What happens if 2 jobs are scheduled at the same time?

I created a local and B2 backups for every 12 hours. And for both backups it says they’ll run at 8am and 8pm. What will happen when that time comes? Will both run at the same time or sequentially?

Also how to schedule it to run every 12 hours, but not 8am/8pm?
If in “Times Of Day” field I enter 01:00 and 13:00 then in the upcoming snapshots it says:

  • 09/08/2023 8:00 PM (in 3 hours)
  • 09/09/2023 1:00 AM (in 8 hours)
  • 09/09/2023 8:00 AM (in 15 hours)
  • 09/09/2023 1:00 PM (in 20 hours)
  • 09/09/2023 8:00 PM (in a day)

8am/8pm are still included.

I don’t know if this is a bug or I’m misunderstanding how it works.

Regarding two backups scheduled at the same time, the “Maximum Parallel Snapshots” policy setting determines the maximum number of snapshots that can upload at the same time. As long as you have that set to 2 or higher, then your two backups can run at the same time. And the inverse is true, too: if you only want one to run at a time, then set it to 1. You can find more detail in this post

As for the time of day, I had a similar problem. For me (and I would guess for you as well), what was happening was that I had a global policy that defined a time for my backups to run, and that was a good time for most backups, but there was one backup I wanted to run at a different time. So I set a different time for it, but that only added an additional time that it would run (like what you’re seeing). To fix that, I had to set that one backup’s policy not to inherit from parent. To do that, I used the following command:

kopia policy set /path/for/my/policy --snapshot-time "01:00" --inherit false

The --inherit false arg sets that time in place of the time set on the parent (global) policy, rather than in addition to it.

Is that per repository/destination or global for all backup jobs.
As I mentioned, I have 1 local repository and 1 B2. I want my backup jobs to run sequentially, not parallel.

I’m using GUI to set everything. Is there a way to do it there?

My understanding based on the post I linked and the policy set documentation is that this should be the maximum number of parallel snapshots for the server (or GUI instance). Meaning, across multiple repositories. However, I’ve only ever had direct experience with one repository, so I can’t say definitively.

I’m sorry, I’ve never used the GUI, so I don’t know. However, if not, you can still use the CLI to modify your policy. It would be a one-off command to modify it, and then you could still use the GUI for scheduling, future modifications, restores, etc.