From: Robert L Mathews <lists@tigertech.com>
To: <bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: [Bacula-users] Making Backups Run Every Other Week
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:04:23 -0700

In case anyone is interested, here's a tip I came up with.

My backup policy is such that I need backups to run every other week. I 
have two separate "offsite" tape pools, and a backup is made to each of 
them on alternating weeks.

Bacula's scheduler currently doesn't handle "every two weeks", and using 
something like "the first and third weeks for backup A, and the second 
and fourth weeks for backup B" means there will be no backup done on the 
fifth week if the month contains one. Scheduling a backup for the fifth 
week doesn't help; it means that the same backup would sometimes run 
twice in a row, which ruins the alternating week scheme.

I first thought of poking around the code to make the scheduler support 
"every two weeks", and I someday may still do so. However, I found an 
easier way to do this is in the meantime: with a RunBeforeJob line.

What I do is schedule both jobs to run every single week. Then the job 
that runs my "Offsite Backup A" has this line:

  RunBeforeJob = "/etc/bacula/two_week_script 'July 6 2003'"

And the job with my "Offsite Backup B" has this one:

  RunBeforeJob = "/etc/bacula/two_week_script 'July 13 2003'"

And two_week_script is the following Perl script:

----------------

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use constant SECONDS_IN_WEEK => 86400 * 7;
use constant SECONDS_IN_TWO_WEEKS => SECONDS_IN_WEEK * 2;

# Calculate the elapsed seconds since the starting date,
# which must be in a format that /bin/date can understand
# Note that this relies on the GNU "%s" date extension
my $start_date = shift;
$start_date = `/bin/date -d '$start_date' +'%s'`;
chomp $start_date;
my $time_since_start_date = time - $start_date;

# Now take those seconds modulo the number of seconds in
# two weeks. If we're in the second half of the two week
# period, exit with an error to stop the Bacula job. If
# we're in the first half, the script will terminate normally
# and the Bacula job will run.
if ($time_since_start_date % SECONDS_IN_TWO_WEEKS
        >= SECONDS_IN_WEEK)
{
        exit 1;
}

----------------

The result is that the script cancels the job that should not be run that 
week, while allowing the other job to continue.

This idea could be trivially changed to support running every three 
weeks, every two months, every prime number of days, etc.

Anyway, just a tip in case anyone else needs to schedule things in a way 
that the scheduler doesn't currently support. It's pretty obvious that 
this is the right way to do it now, but I puzzled over it for a little 
while before coming up with this.

-- 
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies