Scheduling backups and running manual backups

How to schedule backups and run backups manually.

Scheduling Backups

Please note:

Since Brain functionality will limited during a backup run (see What is unavailable during a a backup in the FAQ section above), it is recommended to schedule backups for the time when your environment is least busy.

To set a backup schedule for Sundays at 11:00PM:

backup schedule enable --hour 23 --weekday sunday

Example output:

Scheduled backups enabled on Sundays at 23:00, CDT.
External target upload is disabled.

Please Note:

The scheduled time is shown in the Brain's local time, but is stored in UTC time in the system. UTC time does not change with daylight savings time, so for the above example (CDT = UTC - 5), backups would happen at an hour earlier, at 22:00 CST during standard time (CST = UTC - 6).

To see the currently configured schedule:

show backup schedule

Example output:

Scheduled backups are enabled on Sundays at 23:00 CDT.
External target upload is disabled.

With the above schedule configuration, the backup will be local only. To enable upload to an external target (which must also be configured as shown in the Configuring External Targets section below), use the --enable-external-upload option as shown in the below example:

backup schedule enable --enable-external-upload

Disable it with --disable-external-upload:

backup schedule enable --disable-external-upload

Scheduled backups are disabled by default. If you enable them but later decide to disable them, scheduled backups may be disabled with the following command:

backup schedule disable

Running Backups Manually

To backup locally (even if you have external targets configured):

backup run --local-only

The output would look similar to this (the version and date is embedded in the file name):

................................................................
Complete.
Saved system state to backup file migration-8.4.0-0-10941-20240412-0022.tar.gz.gpg

migration just means the same thing as backup and is inconsequential.

To run a backup that includes external targets,remove the --local-only option as seen in the below example:

backup run
...............................................................
Complete.
Saved system state to backup file migration-8.4.0-0-10941-20240412-0027.tar.gz.gpg
SCP Target vadmin@192.168.55.156:/tmp/tmpyp0za1yd: Upload succeeded.
SFTP Target vadmin@192.168.55.156:/tmp/tmp9p6bqa_c: Upload succeeded.
SFTP Target vadmin@192.168.55.156:/tmp/tmpiawxhaot, using password authentication: Upload succeeded.
S3 Target us-west-2 bucket vectra-test-8dcobsfuscatedbucketnamebecb8, path .: Upload succeeded.
Brain-to-Brain Target 192.168.55.156: Staging file succeeded.

In this case a local backup was run and then a copy was uploaded to all configured external targets. If there were any failures, the output would show this.