#Backup

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 .

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

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?

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.

Hey Developers,

We're pleased to invite you to the upcoming "Backup. From Dusk till Dawn" webinar by InterSystems Russia on December 15 at 10:00 (UTC+3, Moscow time)!

Working in support, I usually get asked how many days I should keep journals. Should it be two days or after two backups? More? Less? Why two?

The correct answer (for most of the environments) is that you should keep the journals since the last validated Backup. I.e., until you don't check if a Backup is valid (restoring the file and checking with the Integrity utility), you can't be sure there is a good copy of your data and can't purge the journals safely.

For example, imagine you need to restore your system after a hardware failure that corrupted some databases.

Hello gentlemen,

I hope you can help me because this is a very serious that I can't wait to resolve... Our back-up is currently taking 3 up to 4 Gb per day and we don't know why. We had 270 Gb yesterday and we are today at 274.3 Gb. We keep a computer history of the messages for only 50 days. Here is a picture of what's currently taking the most data place in our healtshare system:

(don't forget that our DB is also connected to the back-up, maybe it is related, I don't know)

Thanks you in advance,

Thomas

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).

All source code to the article is available at: https://github.com/antonum/ha-iris-k8s 

In the previous article, we discussed how to set up IRIS on k8s cluster with high availability, based on the distributed storage, instead of traditional mirroring. As an example, that article used the Azure AKS cluster. In this one, we'll continue to explore highly available configurations on k8s. This time, based on Amazon EKS (AWS managed Kubernetes service) and would include an option for doing database backup and restore, based on Kubernetes Snapshot.

Installation

Let's get right to business.

Hi Community,

Please welcome the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Cloud Backup Strategies

If I have an online backup running and a snapshot backup is run whereby a freeze/thaw is done, will the online backup be affected ?

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?

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?

Hi,

I'm using Operating System authentication and I need to give permission on Healthshare to allow a user to run only this two commands 

##Class(Backup.General).ExternalFreeze()

and

##Class(Backup.General).ExternalThaw()

This user is gonna be use to backup only.

There are any role on HealthShare for this?

Introduction

Despite the fact that InterSystems has long recommended using external backup tools, many users have opted to use the internal Online Backup facility, which is included in all distributions of InterSystems products (IRIS Data Platform, Caché, etc.). The reasons why are quite obvious:

Database systems have very specific backup requirements that in enterprise deployments require forethought and planning. For database systems, the operational goal of a backup solution is to create a copy of the data in a state that is equivalent to when application is shut down gracefully.  Application consistent backups meet these requirements and Caché provides a set of APIs that facilitate the integration with external solutions to achieve this level of backup consistency.

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.

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.

Greetings community. I would like to know how to migrate a BD in production to a local environment. When I have a system in production (BD Sql Server) what we do is mount a local copy to do the analysis with the data and not occupy resources of the system in production. My question is: How do you do it with Intersystems technology? I already tested the PowerBi connector and it looks great, but that's where the question came up.
 

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment. We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions. As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.

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!

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?

Hi All!

I asked previously about the DR server in the cloud but actually, I'm curious about the backup server to use as analytics server more than for recovery in DR case.

There is a recommended practice to use an async mirror as a server for BI (InterSystems Analytics, DeepSee)

The question is if I have PRIMARY in the cloud (AWS, Google, Azure, etc) "how far" should async mirror member be placed? Same cloud, same private cloud or it doesn't matter at all for analytics purposes?

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