Introduced in the 7.4 series of NetWorker was an option for the client resources called “Scheduled backup”. Normally set to “Enabled”, this can be changed to “Disabled” to allow an administrator to leave the client in all its current groups, but to not be backed up.
The purpose of course is that if a client is going to be temporarily unavailable for a few days (e.g., maintenance operations, etc.), an administrator can turn the backups off for that client without having to later remember what groups it has to go back into.
This is a really good idea, with one exception. Humans forget.
What this option needs is an automated reset function. That is, when an administrator turns off scheduled backups, the administrator should also be able to set a date at which point NetWorker will automatically re-enable scheduled backups for the client. NetWorker should, on a daily basis, scan all clients that have scheduled backups disabled to see whether their “reset” date is up, at which point it should automatically re-enable the backups for the client without any further administrator intervention.
Seeing this added to NetWorker would be awesome.
Hi Preston.
I totally agree with you on this (and that is usually the case 🙂 I started using this feature earlier this year, glad that I didn’t need to change the group membership to some “non-backup” clients group that is disabled.
But I discovered that I forget, so the feature you mention here would had been very nice.
This among other things made me use the GUI in such a way I can see all the collumns for clients and groups. Then I can filter on “Scheduled Backup” in the clients, and also on “autostart” for the groups, if I have for any reason disabled that for a group. I like how the GUI can really give you an overview of the big picture – and even copy – paste from GUI to excel.
Best regards, Johannes