Backup Schedules

Relica can run backups on a schedule. We highly recommend this so you don't forget to make backups. By default, Relica will configure new backups to run on a schedule, you need only customize the schedule to your liking.

Frequency

To help simplify scheduling, Relica offers common intervals to run backups:

For most customers, we recommend backing up files either daily, or weekly on multiple days per week.

When applicable, you can usually specify multiple times of day. This is useful if you want to back up more than once in a day, but not as frequently as hourly.

Frequent backups are OK. Unchanged files will not be backed up again, and new snapshots are very small, especially where little has changed. How frequent is too frequent? When your system is constantly running backups after the initial backups complete, it might be too frequent. :) But this is up to you.

If a backup is scheduled for a day of the month that the current month does not have (e.g. to run on the 30th day, but it's February), the backup will still be run on the last day of that month: it will not be skipped just because the month lacks that day.

Long or Missed Backups

If a backup runs for a long time and into the next scheduled time for that backup, that scheduled time will be skipped since the same backup is still running. A certain backup will only be performed one at a time; backup operations will not overlap just because the schedule has it run frequently.

If a backup's scheduled time is missed for any reason (such as the power being off, computer in sleep mode, Internet disconnected, etc.), the backup will be retried at the next opportunity. This is known as a "flexible schedule" and is on by default for new backups.

With a flexible schedule, if a scheduled backup partially completed (either to a single destination and was interrupted, or to multiple destinations and only finished with some), it will be resumed at the next opportunity only for the destinations that were missed or incomplete. Partial backups are resumed from where they left off (whether scheduled or not).

Allow up to a few minutes for a missed backup to be identified and re-run.

Advanced Use

If using Relica in an advanced way, such as with its command line interface, you may wish to know how to unlock its full scheduling capabilities. Technically, Relica schedules can be configured to run on any combination of:

A scheduled time is any where at least one value in every list overlaps with the time. An empty list is considered a wildcard, or a list with all possible values for its category. The only exception is times of day, which requires at least one value.

A time of day can consist of a full 24-hour format (e.g. 14:23) to run at specific times, or just the minutes (e.g. :23) to run every hour at that minute. At least one is required.

Days of week are numbered 0-6 inclusive, with 0 being Sunday.

Days of month are numbered 1-31 inclusive.

Months of year are numbered 1-12 inclusive, with 1 being January.