#Backup

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.

Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)

In this post, I show strategies for backing up InterSystems IRIS using External Backup with examples of integrating with snapshot-based solutions. Most solutions I see today are deployed on Linux on VMware, so a lot of the post shows how solutions integrate VMware snapshot technology as examples.

In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

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? 

Hi, I was wondering if anyone already dealt with this issue:
"System has been suspended for over X seconds, exceeding the maximum duration specified. Allowing system activity to resume. Any ongoing backup has presumably failed. Next InterSystems IRIS backup must be a full one"

our backup system "Commvault" is automatic, how do you tell it once you get this message that the next backup should be full?

thanks,

Eyal

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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?

You may have noticed that to configure a mirror for InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and HealthShare® Health Connect there is a special requirement. I wanted to go through it step by step in this article.

This assumes you have already configured the second failover member and confirmed a successful failover member status in the mirror monitor:

Step 1:Enable HS_Services user (on backup and primary) 

Step 2: Switch to Namespace HSSYS and go to Interoperability > Configure > Credentials.

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?

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.

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!

Hello Everyone,

We currently have CSP application that runs under 2 servers(usually primary), and every month the server reboots for patching SERVER1(primary) in the morning and SERVER2(backup) at night.

Whenever the SERVER1 reboots SERVER2 behaves as primary and when SERVER1 comes back up it will act as backup server.

First Patching:

So, when SERVER1 is down, I need to start httpd service for SERVER2 and stop httpd service for SERVER1 (which is now backup server).

I tried using the code below in terminal to start httpd service for SERVER2 with no success.

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.

Hello,

While doing research on the upgrade to InterSystems IRIS 2024.1.2 version, I was wondering if it would be possible to rollback the installation and return to the previous version in case something went wrong ?

I didn't see anything talking about this in the documentation and when I tried to re-install an older kit over an upgraded instance, I couldn't use it.

Thank you in advance for your reponse

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

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,

I have set up a Docker image with IrisHealth Community Edition and created a backup of all databases with the Management Portal. Obviously, the restore requires a different way, i.e. a terminal or session needs to be started to use a "Do ^DBREST".

Due to the manual first a session (which is probably same as iristerm terminal) needs to be started:

docker exec -it iris iris session iris

If I enter "DO ^DBREST", I get the answer:

<NOROUTINE> *DBREST.

I assume that when I start the session that way I get logged in as "USER", at least the prompt "USER>" indicates this.

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

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

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?

Hey,

since our instance of iris is just utilized during working hours, I would like to simply copy all data via FTP from the server to a NAS during the night.

Are there reasons against this approach?

Are there batch examples of how to stop and start the database?

Thank you in advance!

Erik