Backups of iw-store - Best Practices?

System

Hi -

Our TeamSite backing store is pretty large - 44GB. Because of the fact that the server must be frozen during backups of iw-store, we have set aside the hours of 11pm-5am to freeze the server and do backups. However, the last time we tried to do a full backup, it ended up taking 10+ hours to compress the file using WinRar. Since the backup can't be done piecemeal (that I know of), we had to schedule a 10 hour outage to get the backup. We don't want to continue to have to schedule an outage and we would like to do backups nightly. Does anyone have suggestions about ways we might be able to complete the backup faster/more efficiently?

Just to reiterate, we are currently just using WinRar to compress the iw-store directory. We are on a Windows 2000 server with TeamSite 5.5.2 SP3 and OD 5.6.

Thanks for any and all suggestions.

Adam Stoller

If you're willing to shell out some $$ for Multi-Store licence(s) - you could break your single backing store into more managable backing stores and then you can freeze each one independently of the others to back them up.

Alternatively, if you have the diskspace to do it - things like filesystem mirrors, raid systems, etc. where you can "break" a mirror, or redundantly copy the backing store while its frozen and then backup from the copy rather than the active backing store is another method that I believe has been used a fair amount.

My current customer is on Solaris and uses rsync to copy the backing store to another partition, and then does the backups from the copy rather than the active store - it seems to work fairly well (I was not involved with that aspect of the system design, so I don't really have any additional details to provide - sorry)

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com