Backup: Best practice needed

meikel

Hi,
what is the bettest way to backup teamsite?
Right now we copy the workarea from drive Y: into another folder and zip it there. But this can't be the right way.
So we have some questions:
1. How can we backup the entire workarea best?
2. How can we backup a "delta" best?
3. How can we backup WITH metadata?

regards
meikel Selbmann

Adam Stoller

What is the be[st] way to backup [TeamSite]?

General backup guidelines are available within the TeamSite Administrator's Guide - those practices are primarily concerned with backing up the backing store - not the workareas.

Right now we copy the workarea from drive Y: into another folder and zip it there. But this can't be the right way. So we have some questions:

1. How can we backup the entire workarea best?

If you feel you must backup the workareas - be aware that many backup programs (especially on Windows) have a tendency to 'touch' the files they backup to set/unset the 'Archive' attribute - as such, it will appear to TeamSite that every one of those files has been modified - so you want to make sure whatever approach you use - that it does *NOT* do this.

In that regard, doing a zip of the workarea is probably fine - not necessarily efficient, but it shouldn't cause unnecessary modifications to be created.

2. How can we backup a "delta" best?

What do you mean? Changes that occurred within a workarea since the last backup - but that were still never submitted? Or just changes to the workarea since the last backup?

Probably a decent mechanism to use (for items 1 and 2) would be a script that uses iwlistmod, parses the output, and feeds the resultant list of files to something like zip (or tar if you have cygwin installed). You'd probably want to make sure you only backup files that were changed from staging, and not files that are simply out-of-date from staging.

3. How can we backup WITH metadata?

In the context of the other questions, I think the answer is: scripted; for each file that you are backing up in the workarea, run iwextattr -l and capture the output in a manner that will allow you to 'replay' it (I believe there are scripts for doing this around, if not on DevNet, then probably through Support).

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Putting it altogether: Create a script that runs iwlistmod for a given workarea, parses that output to filter out those files which have simply not been updated from staging, and then run iwextattr -l on each of those files to record a list of attributes that would need to be re-set if the content were restored, then zip up the list of files and the record of extended attributes. You'd then probably want a script that would perform the reverse steps - though if you only want to retrieve certain files from the collection, the script becomes more complex.

Note - the above is all based on backing up changed files from workareas - once a file has been submitted to staging, normal backup procedures for backing up the backing store take care of maintaining backups of all versions of files and their extended attributes.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)