Task Chaining With or Without Wait Option

The Options tab offers a feature called Task Chaining, which allows the configuration of a task to follow the current task:

When Should the Wait  Option be Used?

Typically when you chain tasks, it’s done to avoid overlapping tasks and to avoid having to wait in between tasks unnecessarily.

When a chain of task a+b+c is triggered with the wait option between each task, the task a will not show as finished until c is done. This will avoid the situation where B or C might take a long time and you wouldn’t want A to start again unless B and C are definitely finished. Hence, by using the wait option, ABC acts essentially as one single task.

Note that BackupChain in v4 starts a task and then the task checks for the target folder to be accessible (default forever / configured as 5 years in the tab Backup Target). Consider the scenario: if for any reason the target path for task B or C is never accessible and you have the wait option on in the preceding task, the task A (the preceding task) will never finish and hence will never restart again due to B or C being stuck waiting for the target server to come online. If you don’t use the wait option, the tasks are decoupled and task A would run again while B-C would be still retrying to connect to their targets. Hence switching off the wait option is useful when you have a high priority task at the beginning that you wouldn’t want to get stuck or delayed if subsequent tasks are paused or take too long to finish or can’t access their target servers.