Mostly Harmless

To begin… this: “/” is a “slash.” Also known as a “forward slash.”

This: “\” is a “back slash.” Also known as “not the forward slash, the one that ‘leans’ to the left, the one on the same key as the vertical bar ‘|’, not the one on the same key as the question mark ‘?’.”

Got it? Good. Let’s remember that when we “map drives.” Do not call me saying that “it doesn’t work” when “it works perfectly fucking well if you know what the hell a ‘back slash’ is.”

Ahem.

To continue… what the fuck is up with these guys? First off, they sell Unix backup software for $2,500 and then they charge extra for the number of tape slots you have in your tape changer. By “extra” I mean thousands of dollars.

That’s all standard practice in Unix Server Land though: “(Q) What does your product cost? (A) How many processors do you have?”

So anyway, you deal with the pain of purchasing the software, then you have to deal with the pain of actually using the software. Howsabout we hire some elementary school kids to design the interface next time? It can’t turn out any worse.

After a (long) while you learn to stumble through the interface, but the “cup of grass,” the “pizza resistance,” is the backup scheduler.

Let’s say, for instance, that you want to rotate between two sets of backup tapes. There is no “every other week” option, there is only “week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, and ‘last week’.”

You may foolishly think that setting one schedule to week 1, 3 & last, and the other to week 2 & 4 would result in an alternating schedule between two sets of tapes.

To that I say: fat chance.

Sometimes week 4 and “last” are the same week. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they overlap.

That last bit should throw you. Sometimes they overlap.

You were probably thinking that a week was a stretch of time lasting 7 days — and you’d be right — but you also probably just assumed that it started on a Sunday, or a Saturday, or a Monday even.

How terribly, terribly wrong you are. It’s sad really, you were doing fine up until that point.

You see, apparently, the “week” starts on “1″ and goes to “7″, then the next week goes from “8″ to “14″, then “15″ to “21″, etc. That last week is just 29-30 and 31, if necessary.

If you’re looking at, oh I don’t know… a calendar, you will find that the backup schedule is doing all sorts of weird shit, vis-a-vis the traditional concept of “a week.”

E.G. if you have two backup sets, A & B, and you have two schedules per set, one for a full backup on Monday and one for incrementals the rest of the week, you will get: a full backup (B) on Monday, incrementals (B) til (the next date that is an even multiple of 7), incrementals (A) on the other tape set til Monday when you get a full backup (A) on that set, incrementals (A) til (next multiple of 7)… (repeat)

You change tape sets on the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th of the month — no matter what day of the week it is. So here’s the day of the week schedule for the rest of the year:

June — Saturday
July — Monday
August — Thursday
September — Sunday
October — Tuesday
November — Friday
December — Sunday

So, yeah, that’s amusing.

They have to know of the existence of the appropriate day-of-the-week algorithm because there’s a calendar right in the fucking application! On that calendar you see the schedule that requires tape changes on a different day of the week every month.

As far as I can recall, most code editors have a feature that will let you “copy” one chunk of code (say, from the calendar part) and “paste” it somewhere else (say, the backup scheduler part).

I bet, if they tried, they could make the scheduler do backups on the same day of the week every month.

They’ve got the code already, I’m sure. We just need to license it for $100 x (number of slots in tape loader) x (number of drives in tape loader).

Lamers.

Time to write a script that schedules every run date individually…