Unless you are using Cedar Backup to manage a “pool of one”, you will need to set up some coordination between your clients and master to make everything work properly. This coordination isn't difficult — it mostly consists of making sure that operations happen in the right order — but some users are suprised that it is required and want to know why Cedar Backup can't just “take care of it for me”.

Essentially, each client must finish collecting all of its data before the master begins staging it, and the master must finish staging data from a client before that client purges its collected data. Administrators may need to experiment with the time between the collect and purge entries so that the master has enough time to stage data before it is purged.