New post

#Backup

7

In information technology, a backup, or the process of backing up, refers to the copying and archiving of computer data so it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event.

In InterSystems Data Platform backup means procedures for backing up data in database files and all the related procedures which assure that no any application data is being lost during backup and recovery.

Documentation.

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 :)

19 24
5 10.4K

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.

Open Exchange app
23 16
6 3.2K

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.

1 7
2 2.6K

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.

0 9
0 1.8K

C:\data\backup.bat :

C:\InterSystems\Ensemble\bin\cache -s"C:\InterSystems\Ensemble\Mgr" -U%%SYS ##Class(Backup.General).ExternalFreeze() <C:\data\login.scr

echo %ERRORLEVEL%

rem note that we need to check errorlevel from highest to lowest here....

if errorlevel 5 goto OK

2 0
0 1.8K

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.

7 2
5 1.6K

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?

0 10
1 1.5K

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. Not sure how to approach restoring this old of a database and eventually upgrading it to a newer re

0 36
1 730

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.

Open Exchange app
12 7
1 685

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.

0 5
0 651

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.

1 8
0 638

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.

0 4
0 603

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

0 3
0 544

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

0 3
0 521
Question
· Apr 21, 2023
Restoring a 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 .CBK file, but I'm not hav

0 7
0 466

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:

Open Exchange app
11 0
2 438