Table of ContentsView in Frames

Backup job specifications

Before you run a backup job, you must specify certain information to enable it to perform as expected. This information includes details such as the backup schedule, the backup retention policy, and the alert notifications of backup activity.

If you have registered VSC with SnapCenter, you supply these details in a backup policy. You can then associate that policy with one or more backup jobs.

If you are using the built-in VSC backup feature, you must specify the information directly in the backup job. The built-in backup feature does not support backup policies.

When you add a new backup job, you can specify whether you want to initiate either a SnapMirror or SnapVault update on the virtual entities that are to be backed up or to create VMware snapshots for every backup. If you select virtual machines that span multiple datastores, you can specify that one or more of the datastores be excluded from the backup.

If you want to use a backup script that is installed on the server with this job, you can choose the script to run. If you create a prebackup or postbackup script that results in an output file when the script is run, the output file is saved to the same directory where you initially installed the prebackup or postbackup script. You can specify the hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly schedule that you want applied to your backup job, or you can add a backup job without attaching a schedule to the backup.

Note: The technical report "SnapManager 2.0 for Virtual Infrastructure Best Practices" contains information about setting up and using backup scripts.

http://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-3737.pdf

You can specify a retention policy indicating either the maximum number of days or the maximum number of backup jobs that are retained.

You can also set up email alerts for this backup job. You must first set the SMTP server and the destination email addresses to receive an alert notification when an alarm is triggered or the system status changes. You can enable or disable alarms and specify how often you receive email alerts when an error or warning occurs. The Notify on options in the Schedule Backup wizard include the following:
Always
An alert notification is always sent.
Errors or Warnings
A backup failure or a warning triggers an alert notification.
Errors
A backup failure or partial failure triggers an alert notification.
Never
An alert notification is never sent.