#Backup

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.

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.

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.

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:

This article will introduce you to the concept of virtual environments in Python, which are essential for managing dependencies and isolating project from the OS.

What is a Virtual Environment?

A virtual environment is a folder that contains :

• A specific version of Python
• At start an empty site-packages directory

Virtual environments will help you to isolate your project from the OS Python installation and from other projects.

How to use it?

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.

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.

The goal of this writing was to illustrate how to restore backup before the patch would be applied. The alert notes that: 

The risk can be avoided by applying journals from the beginning of the journal file that was switched to at the start of the backup, rather than accepting the default of starting from the journal marker position.

Having non-patched Caché 2015.1.4, I ran sample database backup and restore just to get where I should answer "No".

Hey everyone.

I came across some issues when setting up Freeze and Thaw batch scripts for use with VMWare in a Windows ecosystem, and I wanted to share what I found in the hopes it can help others. This was undertaken in an environment using Healthconnect 2019.1.x.

IRIS not up (2)

It seems that the sample script from the documentation in my my case would tell me that the environment was not running (despite it running). To correct this, I provided the filepath to the Mgr location as so:

c:\InterSystems\HealthConnect\bin\irisdb -s"C:\InterSystems\HealthConnect\Mgr" -U%%SYS ##Class(Backup.General).

I have found this one line command from the Terminal is the quickest way to backup my routines.

In the Namespace the routines reside:

w $SYSTEM.OBJ.Export("MYRTNS*.MAC","C:\Users\Username\Desktop\MYRTNS.BCK-9-2-2016-8AM")

Hello Community,

I'd like to share with you our article with @Regilo.Souzaon AWS Amazon blog Automating application-consistent Amazon EBS Snapshots for InterSystems IRIS databases. Our team has created this step-by-step instruction to create application-consistent snapshots for InterSystems IRIS databases. In this article, we outline how to automate pre-scripts to pause I/O and flush buffer to disk and post-scripts to thaw I/O, as shown in the following figure:

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)!

Hi Community,

Please welcome the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Cloud Backup Strategies

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.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

You can use the system routine ^DBSIZE to estimate the backup file size (see also Note 1).

^DBSIZE estimates the file size of full, cumulative, and differential backups of the databases selected in the database backup list.

The database backup list is created from [System Administration] > [Configuration] > [Database Backup] > [Database Backup List] in the Management Portal.

For more information, please refer to the document below.

Estimate backup size with ^DBSIZE [IRIS]

Estimate backup size with ^DBSIZE

An execution example is as follows.

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.

Hi, Community! 

Please welcome a new session recording from Global Summit 2017:

Backup Essentials - Protecting Your Data

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

InterSystems has corrected a defect that may result in missing updates when utilizing Caché online backup.

This defect is present in all Caché and Ensemble versions 2015.1.x, 2015.2.x and 2016.1.x, and all HealthShare distributions based on those versions.  It affects all platforms and operating systems except backups of OpenVMS cluster databases.

The risk does not exist for Mirror Catchup applied to mirrored databases restored from Caché online backup.

The risk only exists when restoring from Caché online backup and applying journal files.

Hi, Community! 

 Check the second Developer Community Video of the week:

Backup and Restore for Federated Systems

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.

At the moment, we have 10 HealthShare instance servers (5 x mirrored pairs), where we implement an External Backup approach, using the freeze/thaw commands against whichever server of the pair is the backup mirror member, to complete a VM level backup. These backups are stored to a disk within our control, to purge as required. This approach allows us to deliver a zero downtime backup approach.

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?

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

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.

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

Hi,

I'm trying to run some scripting in Windows. I'm using an instance of the IRISHealth community. 

I'm just trying to run a simple sequence of commands so I can run irissession in a non-interactive mode, like:

irissession.exe IRISHEALTH -U "%SYS" < "myprogram.iris"

set$namespace="%SYS"set cbk = "C:\Test1.cbk"set log = "C:\Test1.

Hi community,

We have a developed a new version of a production, all the code is new and has changed BP. This application load information for some brands and stored in database.

The customer wants to implement the changes only for some brands because he wants to check for small brands before to implement for all brands.

My proposal is create a new namespace, with the new code, and disabled all load of brands except the brand that he wants to check.

I'm wondering what is the best way to clone the namespace.