Configuring a Pool for Manual Backups

You can create a customized pool to receive data from a manual backup by specifying "manual" in the Level attribute. Backup, however, sorts data from a manual backup differently than data from a regularly scheduled backup. Because a manual backup is not performed as part of a scheduled backup group, the data is not associated with any group name. Thus, when you perform a manual backup in which only a single client's save set data is saved, the group normally associated with that client's save set is not included as a criterion for pool assignment. As a consequence, data from a manual backup may be sent to a different pool than the pool in which data from this client's save set is stored during a regularly scheduled backup operation.

If you do not create a customized pool to receive data from manual backups, Backup uses the Default pool and looks for a mounted volume from the Default pool on which to write manually backed-up data. Because Backup tracks the volume location of all backup data, you do not need to worry about tracking which volume contains the manually backed-up data. If you need to recover the data, Backup requests the correct volume.

When you perform a manual backup, the client index and server bootstrap are not included in the backup. If you never perform regularly scheduled backups of the clients and server machines, the information vital to data recovery in the event of a disaster is not available.