Schedule transfers

This document describes scheduling transfer jobs with Storage Transfer Service. It includes information on scheduling recurring jobs and supported job run frequencies, and examples for scheduling a job.

Overview

You can schedule your transfer jobs to run periodically, as frequently as every hour. Storage Transfer Service runs an incremental transfer at the frequency you specify, copying data to Cloud Storage, and recording the results of the transfer in the Google Cloud Console without human intervention.

You can create or edit a transfer schedule when you create or edit a transfer job.

Storage Transfer Service jobs support the following interval periods:

  • Hours
  • Days
  • Weeks

You can elect to start the first transfer now, or at a future time.

Important considerations

Keep the following in mind when scheduling transfers:

  • Timezones: The Google Cloud console displays transfer job schedules in your local timezone, but stores those times in Universal Time Coordinated (UTC). If you are affected by Daylight Savings Time (DST), you might experience a transfer job schedule change when DST starts or ends.

    When you configure or edit transfer jobs using the Storage Transfer Service API or gcloud CLI, specify the time in UTC.

  • Overlapping runs: At most one operation can be active for a given job. If a transfer job is in progress and its next run is scheduled to begin, that run of the job is skipped.

  • Pausing or disabling a job: If you pause a transfer job or deactivate a transfer job, the schedule doesn't trigger any new operations until the job is resumed or re-activated.

Example schedules

The following table presents several scheduling scenarios, and how to configure the scenario in the schedule editor:

Scenario How to configure your schedule
Copy data every night at midnight, forever
  • Run every day
  • Starting on
  • Start date/time—tonight at midnight
  • End date—None
Copy data every hour, starting now
  • Run with custom frequency
  • Starting now
  • End date—None
  • Custom frequency:
    • Repeat every—1
    • Hours
Copy data every Tuesday at 3PM, starting in 2 weeks and stopping on April 3, 2030.
  • Run every week
  • Starting on
  • Start date/time—Tuesday 3:00PM, 2 weeks from now
  • End date—April 3, 2030

In addition to scheduling jobs at a specified time, you can re-run a job using the same configuration. Re-run jobs use the same configuration, but run only once.