If you have a schedule that puts its output into /Backups, when you run any schedule that just backs up one file into that folder to push offsite, it copies ALL and every folders in the /Backup location
Is this unintended consequence/ design/ mistake???
Hey John,
This is an intended behavior. The offisites back up all of the data in the folder to your offsite location, ensuring that the backups in the folder exist there. Iād definitely recommend setting your backup schedules to output to a subfolder so you donāt send more than youāre intending.
-Kyle
Thanks, is this documented in the help??
It could be an expensive mistake if you use a script of your own and āforgetā that is going to the root
I also found this behavior very unexpected. I was expecting OttoFMS to only send the backup it was sending.
Even when pushing backups to separate subfoldersā¦ I wouldnāt have expected it to send all of the backup folders in that subfolder.
I think you need to be keeping either zero or only one for this purposeā¦
I changed to having only 1 also.
It is called out in the docs, but not very clearly. I can add a callout about this to the form for making a new schedule.
As for why we do this, there are a few reasons. If a single offsite backup fails for some reason, it will be sent up with the next backup so you are not missing any. It is also much simpler and less error prone for OttoFMS to send the contents of the folder rather than attempting to determine which of the folders in the specified folder are the most recent one.
-Kyle
Appreciate the info @kduval. Itās not a deal breaker, but a callout in docs to be clearer would be helpful.
Having the callout that all folders/files at the path will be backed up may be more easily seen if it wasnāt under the subheading āUse and Existing Scheduleā. If you are creating a new schedule, you would skip right over this. ( at least that is what happened to me ).
OttoFMS will pick up the folder the schedule backs up to and will send all files within that folder to the offsite storage.
Ah yes I could see that. There is a slightly less clear callout to similar effect a couple paragraphs above that, Iāll make it pop a bit more.
-Kyle
Fancy new callout is now live on the docs, Iāll add a note to the schedule form in our next version too.
-Kyle
Well, Iām certainly glad I read this. Our offsite backup is done through a script which grabs a specific backup (or, alternatively, the most recent backup but my director prefers to call out the backup by time and use a chron job) Then the backup up files are stored in S3. But in the past we used to use the zero backup schedule. This works well unless you are dealing with large quantities of files, because then the ALL have to be backed up by FileMaker each time, instead of keeping unchanged files.
Version 4.7.0 adds a new blurb to the Offsite Schedule setup modal which describes a bit more of the behavior of the schedule so this hopefully wonāt bite anyone else in the butt. Thanks for all your feedback everyone!
-Kyle