A schedule allows you to perform automatic unattended activities on a backup. You can create a schedule and assign backups to that schedule. A schedule is composed of details that define when unattended backups will be performed.

The DS-Client checks for scheduled operations that are to be triggered 24 hours a day. If a scheduled activity is started but cannot finish because the connection to the DS-System cannot be established or is lost, the DS-Client retries thee times at five-minute intervals (by default) to resume or initiate the connection.

If the scheduled operation is missed for this reason, an attempt will be made to perform it at the next scheduled time. For example, a backup scheduled to take place every day at 14:00 will retry the next day at 14:00. If communication between the DS-Client and the customer's LAN fails for any reason, no attempts will be made to reconnect.

If an activity is running at the same time as a scheduled operation and the activity prevents other operations from running, the scheduled operation will start as soon as the activity ends. By default, the DS-Client attempts to start a scheduled operation every minute for 6 hours from the scheduled start time. You can configure the interval using the ScheduleMiss advanced configuration parameter. For more information, see “Configuring the advanced settings”.

You can limit the number of scheduled activities that can run concurrently by configuring the MaxSessions (Windows) or MaxSessions Number (Linux) advanced configuration parameter. For Grid DS-Clients, the limit will be the sum of all the MaxSessions parameters from all running nodes. This is useful if you are running simultaneous backups and some data is being backed up using a slower connection. Similarly, if there are too many backups using the same schedule, this will decrease the efficiency of the DS-Client. For more information, see “Configuring the advanced settings”.