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Veritas Access Appliance 8.2 Administrator's Guide

Last Published: 2025-09-22

Product(s): Appliances (8.2)

Platform: Veritas 3340,Veritas 3350,Veritas 3360

Configuring snapshot schedules

You can use snapshot schedules to automate creation of snapshots at regular intervals. The snapshot limit defines how many snapshots to keep for each schedule.

In some instances, snapshots may skip scheduled runs.

This may happen because of the following:

When a scheduled snapshot is set to trigger, the snapshot needs to gain a lock to begin the operation. If any command is issued from the CLI or is running through schedules, and if the command holds a lock, the triggered snapshot schedule is not able to obtain the lock, and the scheduled snapshot fails.
When a scheduled snapshot is set to trigger, the snapshot checks if there is any instance of a snapshot creation process running. If there is a snapshot creation process running, the scheduled snapshot aborts, and a snapshot is not created.

To create a snapshot schedule

To create a snapshot schedule, enter the following:
```
Storage> snapshot schedule create schedule_name fs_name
max_snapshot_limit 		minute [hour] [day_of_the_month] 
[month] [day_of_the_week] [max_num_of_parallel_snapshot_removal] 
[worm] [retention_period]
```
For example, to create a schedule for an automated snapshot creation of a given file system at 3:00 am every day, enter the following:
```
Storage> snapshot schedule create schedule1 fs1 100 0 3 * * *
```
When an automated snapshot is created, the entire date value is appended, including the time zone.

schedule_name	Specifies the name of the schedule corresponding to the automatically created snapshot. The schedule_name cannot contain an underscore ('_') as part of its value. For example, sch_1 is not allowed.
fs_name	Specifies the name of the file system. The file system name should be a string.
max_snapshot_limit	Specifies the number of snapshots that can be created for a given file system and schedule name. The value is a numeric value between 1-366. When the number of snapshots reaches the limit, then the oldest snapshot is destroyed. If you decrease the limit for an existing schedule, then multiple snapshots may be destroyed (oldest first) until the number of snapshots is less than the maximum snapshot limit value. Note: If you need to save daily snapshots for up to one year, the max_snapshot_limit is 366.
minute	This parameter may contain either an asterisk like '/15'', which implies every 15 minutes, or a numeric value between 0-59. Note: If you are using the '/xx' format, the smallest value for 'xx' is 15. You can enter /(15-59) or a range such as 23-43. An asterisk () is not allowed.
hour	This parameter may contain either an asterisk, (), which implies "run every hour," or a number value between 0-23. You can enter /(0-23), a range such as 12-21, or just the *.
day_of_the_month	This parameter may contain either an asterisk, (), which implies "run every day of the month," or a number value between 1-31. You can enter /(1-31), a range such ass 3-22, or just the *.
month	This parameter may contain either an asterisk, (), which implies "run every month," or a number value between 1-12. You can enter /(1-12), a range such as 1-5, or just the *. You can also enter the first three letters of any month (must use lowercase letters).
day_of_the_week	This parameter may contain either an asterisk (*), which implies "run every day of the week," or a numeric value between 0-6. Crontab interprets 0 as Sunday. You can also enter the first three letters of the week (must use lowercase letters).
max_num_of_parallel_snapshot_removal	Specifies the number of snapshots that can be removed in parallel for a given file system and schedule name.
worm	Enables WORM. The possible values are worm=yes/no. Default value of this parameter is no. To create a schedule with worm=yes, the file system should be WORM-enabled.
retention_period	Specifies the retention period. The format can be [1-9](d\|D\|m\|M\|y\|Y) or yyyy-mm-dd.

For example, the following command creates a schedule schedule1 for automated snapshot creation of the fs1 file system every 3 hours each day, and maintains only 30 snapshots:

Storage> snapshot schedule create schedule1 fs1 30 0 */3 * * *

To modify a snapshot schedule

To modify a snapshot schedule, enter the following:

Storage> snapshot schedule modify schedule_name fs_name
max_snapshot_limit minute [hour] [day_of_the_month] 
[month] [day_of_the_week] [max_num_of_parallel_snapshot_removal] 
[worm] [retention_period]

You can modify the worm and retention period values for a schedule.

For example, to modify the existing schedule so that a snapshot is created at 2:00 am on the first day of the week, enter the following:

Storage> snapshot schedule modify schedule1 fs1 *2**1

To display a snapshot schedule

To display all of the schedules for automated snapshots, enter the following:

Storage> snapshot schedule show [fs_name] [schedule_name]

fs_name	Displays all of the schedules of the specified file system. If no file system is specified, schedules of all of the file systems are displayed.
schedule_name	Displays the schedule name. If no schedule name is specified, then all of the schedules created under fs_name are displayed.