Need some clarification on Backing up of iw-store

mksiw

Iam in the process of learning the Backing-store conversion. I'd gone through the backing store conversion document. Can anyone please clarify me on the below questions:

1. What is conventional backup of backing-store?
2. I had gone though the backing store conversion docs all they say is "iwfreeze the backing store and backup the iw-store", Do they mean to say copy the iw-store to different location? or Do we need to use any seperate tool for the backup?

thanks in advance.

gwen1

I believe in the documentation... they are trying to get you to plan for the worst. This is very very important. During my conversion the Sun Admin rebooted my 5.5.2 server, without notifying me. I only lost part of my newly converted backingstore since I had another copy to put into place. A backup is basically a copy of the backingstore. It should be frozen or Teamsite stopped to prevent writing to the iw-store directory during this process.

Some suggestions:
1. Follow your normal processes on the source server, nightly backups or however you normally handle this.
2. If possible convert in small chunks... ie. one branch at a time, groups of editions, etc.
3. After conversion script stops.. backup the newly converted backingstore. I could not easily get our normal backup procedure in place, so I created at tar.Z file of the iw-store directory.
4. While it was running, I would run iwfsk -d on my 5.5.2 server to verify that I had a good converted backingstore with no errors.
5. If iwconvert is interrupted and does not end on an edition, you need to start over from the last good point. (When you are 30 hours or more into the process, do not want to have to start over from the beginning)

Hope this helps!

Gwen