#Backup

I am looking for experience of people running Veeam with Caché databases. 

Tips/Tricks/General questions like; what Veeam features are you using, what your backup cycle looks like, where does your data end up, what recovery/integrity checks you do, what sort of compression/dedupe you get. 

Also what questions _you_ have and what problems you might be trying to solve.

A customer is using Caché online backups and needs to automatically purge the cbk files with a scheduled task.

This is a wheel has been reinvented uncountable times already and I know somebody out there has a well written, extremely robust version that has already stood the test of time.

Does anyone have a nice routine/class/task for purging old Caché backup files? 

We are retiring a hosted application for an electronic health care records (EHR) system which stored the data on Cache for UNIX (Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86-64) 2017.2.2 (Build 867_4_20245) Thu Oct 8 2020 16:58:40 EDT.  The hosting company is providing me with a single CBK file.  I need to install a database system to restore the database and provide occasional SQL access for reports when necessary.  I'll need to maintain access to the data for an approximately 10 year retention period.

If I have a cache.dat file from a Windows 2012 (64-bit) machine and I want to mount it on a Caché instance running on RHEL, will it work? Assume the versions of Caché are the same.

I have a client who' recently acquired a business that was running software that uses InterSystems IRIS as the database back end.  In the process of preparing to have my company's software installed the client formatted the hard drive of his server, wiping out his data.  I can't convert the data to MS SQL without a functioning database.  He had a backup on an external drive, which I have copied down to my local machine.  I loaded up  a virtual machine with Windows 10 Pro, I installed Docker and IRIS.  I started searching for explicit instructions for restoring the .

Hello everyone,

I want to restore a database from an external backup with the journal files.

The manual says I should (in short):

1. Stop journaling with ^JRNSTOP
2. Restore the database file IRIS.DAT
3. Run the journal restore utility with ^JRNRESTO
4. Restart journaling ^JRNSTART

Since I want to restore one database only step 1 would disable journaling for the whole instance, not only for the database to be restored. As I understand, it would be impossible to restore a different database if there occurs a problem while journaling is disabled during the recovery process?

Good afternoon, everyone,

I would like to know if it's possible to restore a backup directly from a .DAT file, or if it's only possible to restore a backup made with a .cbk file?

Best regards, Flávio."

Hi,

A site has a Mirror set, and an Asynchronous DR.  The disk drives for each of the instances are local disks and the databases are large (>2 TB)

The current backup strategy is started off as using Cache Backup and is still the case today, but the size and time it take t do the backup is obviously prohibitive.

The External Backup procedure requires a Freeze/Thaw of the Cache environment, with a copy of the environment executing between these 2 steps, however, being on local disks, there seems to be no way to quickly copy off the OS files and cache databases in time.

We are finally planning to migrate some ancient Caché applications that are run on Caché 5.0.21 to a new server with Caché 2016.2.0 or so.

I wonder if we could use Shadowing between those to keep the data on the new server up to date?

We would copy the Caché backup from the old environment to the new and do a RESTORE there and then start shadowing.

I know than 5.0.21 is no more officially supported by ISC.

We are currently implementing the Data Innovations Instrument Manager product.  In setting up our backup process we are wanting to use Veam snapshots. The application runs in a Caché 2016.1/Windows Server 2016 instance.  We are running an HA primary/secondary/arbiter config. The statement below is from DI.  I am curious to see what others that have implemented the DI Instrument Manager in the same or similar config have in place for backup.

"DI recommends is recommending that we not perform snapshots, but if you do choose to do so, here is some important information to consider.

Hi,

We are trying to write an external backup application to backup Cache Database. After going through the Cache DB documentation, we have found that in Backup.General class there are methods for creating snapshot (Freeze/Thaw) which is required during backup. Are there REST APIs for the same?

Also we have the option of selecting individual DB instances in the management portal.  What are the methods/APIs of getting the DB list, so that user can select individual DB instances in an external backup application ? Do we have the methods/APIs to freeze/thaw the individual DB instances ?

Thanks!

I would like to know if it is possible to backup a database via shellscript in Linux?

Thanks.

Between Aix(backup) and Windows(recovery) , How to do this?

Hi, folks!

What could be the best backup/restore strategy for a small (less than 100MB) but very valuable database which is placed on AWS/DO virtual host?

1. Use AWS/DO backup/restore features?

2. External backup (as the most recommended)?

3. InterSystems backup?

4. Globals export to a zipped file?

5. cache.dat copy?

Looking for the most robust and easy to use/implement method of backup and restore in a way "setup and forget" (until it becomes needed :)

We know there are numerous ways to backup cache/ensemble with VMware, but we are not in a state to do that and can't do shadowing because the lack of resources. Anyways how can i backup cache to a drive mounted as network share.

Hi all,

Does anyone backing up with CommVault version 11 (but lets forget the version for now) and had problems using vss to backup Cache/Iris ?

Can you tell me what you did to overcome that problem/problems?

Thanks,

Yossi.k

I have a FullBackup.cbk file generated by Caché Backup Online. This file has many databases.
Is there a Caché feature to restore only one database?
I've tried EXTSELCT^DBREST(), but this routine runs through all databases (skipping the unselected). This process becomes slow, lasting 1 day to finalize the process.

We are currently using Ensemble on AIX. We are on 2015.2.2. If I install Field Test on a windows desktop, is it possible that I can import the Cache.dat from my AIX server, so I can do some Proof of Concept development?

Thanks

Scott

Hi

I have had customers who would rather use a backup application rather than using IRIS Backups. In my experience, I have tried a number of free backup tools and I have paid for at least two "very good Backup Tools" and all of them have failed to create usable backups especially if my Ensemble/IRIS Instances are still running and even if Ensemble/IRIS have been shut down I have found that the backups created by these tools have around an 80% chance of being able to restore a system (let's assume that I am not trying to backup core Windows elements like the Registry and Windows system files).

Hello,

We are trying to migrate all our production to new IRIS servers. To test everything is working fine, and to be able to script the process, we want to import the data into new IRIS servers using a backup file (created with ^BACKUP). But we've found that IRIS doesn't recognize Ensemble backups so we can't import it using ^DBREST  :-O

Any of you know how to import in IRIS an Ensemble backup file?

Thanks a lot,
David

Hi,

Is there a way you can limit the amount of physical memory Cache uses?

During Cache backup it appears that all the available memory on the server is being used.

We are running Ensemble 2016.1 on Windows Server 2008 R2 with 32GB of RAM.

The database we are backing up is about 300GB.

Thanks,

Graham

Hey everyone.

I have been revisiting our backup strategy, and spotted that IRIS supports VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) in Windows. This is quite attractive as an approach, as it automatically calls the external freeze and thaw commands.

However when calling these manually, there's quite a few parameters that can be set, and the documentation around VSS only states that the freeze/thaw commands are called.

Is there a way of controlling the parameters used, or at the very least know what the defaults are?

The steps are as follows：

1. create global

 For I=1:1:200 Set ^ABC(I)=""
 For I=1:1:200 Set ^XYZ(I)=""
 For I=1:1:100 Kill ^ABC(I)

2. create ZJRNFILT

ZJRNFILT(jid,dir,glo,type,restmode,addr,time)    /*Filter*/
  Set restmode=1                                  /*Return 1 for restore*/
  If glo["^ABC",type="K" Set restmode=0           /*except if a kill on ^ABC*/
  Quit
  ;

3. restore

s RestOref=##class(Journal.Restore).%New()
s RestOref.FirstFile="20190717.007"
s RestOref.LastFile="20190717.007"
s RestOref.JournalLog="journal.log"
s RestOref.Filter="^ZJRNFILT"
s Status=RestOref.

Currently running on limited hardware, Online Backups are becoming a bottleneck for our system.

For now, we are exploring an option to backup individual databases, or groups of them, thus reducing RAM requirements per individual backup task. To do that, however, we'd need a separate Backup List for our Backup Tasks. We did not find an option to do so in web portal, so currently we are looking at inheriting from system backup tasks and Backup.General classes to generate Backup List before backing up and then performing the backup as normal.

Is this approach feasible?

Currently we are using Health Share 2015.2.2, and looking to upgrade to the latest version in the next month.

From what I understand we have to upgrade to 2017 or 2018 prior to going to 2019.1 since 2019.1 is on the IRIS platform.

In trying to outline my steps in the upgrade process I came up with a question.

• Can a Full System Backup from 2015.2.2 be restored into 2019.1?
• Do I have to restore the 2015.2.2 back up into 2017 or 2018, then do the 2019.1 conversion?

Has anyone had experience with this? or should I open a ticket with WRC?

Hello, 

I am new to InsterSystems Cache - having a SQL Server background.  However I am dealing with a Third Party who use InterSystems Cache to hold some of our data.  To do some analysis I need to view a backup of the database.  They are prepared to send me a backup.

My question is - how can I view this backup ( would this be the CACHE.dat file?).

Do I effectively need to have an installation of CACHE on my machine to be able to view this?  Is it possible to view it from SQL Server?  

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Colin

Let's say you have about 100TB of data in multiple CACHE.DAT. The biggest one is about 30TB but mostly more than 1TB. You have limited time for maintenance during a day, and it is only a few hours at night. You have to check Integrity as much often as possible. And of course backup it.

How would you do it?

Hi, Community!

We have our internal backup system which produces *.cbk files for Full, Incremental and Cumulative backup modes.

Does anyone have an automation procedure to restore this files on some target testing system, check the integrity and mark the files as "restorable"?

Please, share?

Thank you in advance!

Hi Community!

Consider I have InterSystems IRIS server in a cloud and want to introduce a DR server for it.

Are there any requirements for DR server for InterSystems IRIS if it is in a cloud?

Should it be the same subnet? One private cloud?

Can DR server be placed on another cloud, say Primary on Google Cloud and DR on Azure? Are there any caveats/concerns?

My project need to  restore the previous part of the log,  and I use the rountine "^JRNRESTO" and filter.  After recovery completed,  the table structure is restored, but the table data is not restored， also unable to insert data into the table.