6 seperate monthly backups with ntbackup

[Hetfield]

Hi all,

I need to schedule a monthly backup that runs once every 6 months. The reason for this is I need to setup 6 different monthly backups,so we have 6 months worth of backups we can fall back should anything happen.

I already have a daily backup that runs every day and gets overwritten once a week; eg Monday Backup runs each Monday and overwrites last Monday's, Tuesday Backup runs each Tuesdayand overwrites last Tuesday's etc. I also have a weekly backup that runs once a month for each week; eg W1 runs on the first week of the month and doesn't get overwritten until the first week in the next month and so on.

So I need to do a similar thing where I run M1 the first month, then it doesn't get overwritten until 6 months later, after M6 runs.

I hope this makes sense.

Anyone got any ideas?

[MrJinje]

The easiest thing to do would be to change your policy and retain your backups for a full year. Then the January task could delete the old January backup and so on.

I don't think you can schedule multi month triggers with the old version of task scheduler. (only in vista/2008 server or higher) You might be forced to schedule 12 separate monthly jobs. + 12 cleanup jobs that run 6 months later. Kinda kludgy if you ask me.

Otherwise, you might think about creating a single monthly task calling a VBS script that contains the trigger logic you need.

This is a limitation of the old task scheduler.

Edited March 17, 2010 by MrJinje

[Hetfield]

The easiest thing to do would be to change your policy and retain your backups for a full year. Then the January task could delete the old January backup and so on.

I don't think you can schedule multi month triggers with the old version of task scheduler. (only in vista/2008 server or higher) You might be forced to schedule 12 separate monthly jobs. + 12 cleanup jobs that run 6 months later. Kinda kludgy if you ask me.

Otherwise, you might think about creating a single monthly task calling a VBS script that contains the trigger logic you need.

This is a limitation of the old task scheduler.

Makes sense. Cheers for the help!