ZCS Administrator Guide 8.0

Network Edition

Scheduling a Standard Backup

When ZCS was installed, the backup schedule for the standard method of full and incremental backups was added to the crontab. Under the default schedule, the full backup is scheduled for 1:00 a.m., every Saturday. The incremental backups are scheduled for 1:00 a.m., Sunday through Friday.

By default, backups older than a month are deleted every night at 12 a.m.

You can change the backup schedule using the zmschedulebackup command.

Specify the fields as follows, separate each field with a blank space:

minute — 0 through 59

hour — 0 through 23

day of month — 1 through 31

month — 1 through 12

day of week — 0 through 7 (0 or 7 is Sunday, or use names)

Type an asterisk (*) in the fields you are not using.

Example of zmschedulebackup options

Replace the existing full backup, incremental backup and delete backup schedule. When you use -R, the complete backup schedule is replaced. If you use this command, remember to set the delete schedule, if you want backup sessions to be scheduled for automatic deletion. This example replaces the existing schedule to have full backups run on Sunday at 1 a.m., incremental backups to run Monday through Saturday at 1 a.m., and old backups deleted at 12:00 a.m. every day.

zmschedulebackup -R f “0 1 * * 7” i “0 1 * * 1-6” d “0 0 * * *”

Add an additional full backup time to your current schedule. This example adds a full backup on Thursday at 1 a.m.

zmschedulebackup -A f “0 1 * * 4”

Review your backup schedule. The schedule is displayed.

zmschedulebackup -q

Save the schedule command to a text file. This would allow you to easily recreate the same schedule after reinstall or upgrade

zmschedulebackup -s

Note:

If you change the default schedule and want to return to it, enter the command zmschedulebackup -D.

Default Standard Backup Schedule

The default backup schedule looks like this in the cron table:

 

0 1 * * 6 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -f - all 0 1* * 0-5 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -i 0 0 * * * /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -del 1m

Read as follows:

0 1 * * * 6 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -f - all means that the full backup runs on 1 a.m. on Saturdays.

0 1* * 0-5 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -i means that an incremental backup runs at 1 a.m. from Sunday through Friday.

0 0 * * * /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -del 1m means that backup sessions are deleted at midnight 1 month after they were created.

 

How to read the crontable Each crontab entry contains six fields that appear in this order: Field   1    2    3     4    5       6   0    1    *      *    6        /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -f -all   1 - minute (0-59 allowed) 2 - hour (0-23) 3 - day of month (1-31) 4- month (1-12 or names) 5 -day of week (0-7 or names allowed, with both 0 and 7 representing     Sunday 6 - string to be executed   The asterisk character works as a wild card, representing every occurrence of the field’s value.

Backup Completion Email Notification

You can add additional recipient addresses or change the notification email address in the administration console Global Settings>Backup/Restore page.