mac Restore from backup

[Rick Whitelaw]

Hi,

I've read every article and help file I could find about this subject before posting. In the event I need to restore from a backup (I would assume from a progressive backup since this happens every ten minutes) which file should I copy and upload to the server? The files in the progressive backup folder all seem a couple of days old according to the OS time stamps. My regularly scheduled backups run daily. Perhaps I should change this to hourly, but it seems with progressive backups running every ten minutes that these files would be the most recent.

Rick.

[Wim Decorte]

OS time stamps are not a good indication of when the backup happened.  The folder name is your timestamp.

 

What file to restore depends on what you want to restore: the whole set or just a part of it.  Also remember to never (because of the hard-linking):

- open a backup file from its backup folder

- move a backup file from its backup folder, always copy

 

Progressive Backups are not meant to be the only backup set to rely on during the day since it only covers 20 minutes or so in your setup.  If you needed to go back to something from say 2h ago to hunt for missing records or something like that.

[Rick Whitelaw]

OS time stamps are not a good indication of when the backup happened.  The folder name is your timestamp.

 

What file to restore depends on what you want to restore: the whole set or just a part of it.  Also remember to never (because of the hard-linking):

- open a backup file from its backup folder

- move a backup file from its backup folder, always copy

 

Progressive Backups are not meant to be the only backup set to rely on during the day since it only covers 20 minutes or so in your setup.  If you needed to go back to something from say 2h ago to hunt for missing records or something like that.

Thanks Wim,

Then I'm failing to understand the point of progressive backups I guess.

Rick.

[Wim Decorte]

Then I'm failing to understand the point of progressive backups I guess.

 

 

 

Think it through... and think of the different scenarios:

multiple FM files in a solution vs a monolithic file, light load on the solution vs. heavy load, slow server vs. fast server,...

 

A progressive backup collects changes during the specified interval, at the end of the interval it writes those changes into the oldest progressive backup set it has.

 

A regular backup schedule does:

- nothing during the interval

- backs up all files at the specified time (hard links files that have not been saved for speed & disk space savings)

 

In a busy environment, with monolithic files; the progressive backup will be much faster than a traditional backup and will generate less of a burden on the server (and the connected users).

Often, in this kind of scenario, developer tend to forgo frequent backups because of the negative effect it has on the user experience.

Progressive backups helps alleviate that particular problem.  It gives a more efficient way to always have a recent restore point.

 

But since it only keeps two sets, it is not made to be a comprehensive backup policy that allows you to go back to different restore points during the day.  Its only focus is to give you that one crucial most recent restore point to fall back on.

 

If it takes the users more than 20 minutes to report a data problem then your progressive backups are not going to help you.  So supplement it with say an hourly normal backup.

How to set up a proper comprehensive backup strategy is not decided in a vacuum of course, these decisions are made after talking through this at length with the customer.

[Rick Whitelaw]

Thanks again Wim.

I have progressive backups scheduled for every ten minutes. Inside the progressive backup folder are two folders that each contain a set of files (there are also the folders with the non FM files which I figure track the changes). I'm a little thick on this. If I were to restore a file from the progressive backups, which of the two files would I copy? Are they the same?

Thanks for all your help,

Rick.

[Wim Decorte]

I don't think I follow:

Both timestamped folders in the Progressive Backups folder contain a full set of all backed-up FM files.  The folder tells you the date & time of the backup.

So which one do you restore?  Depends on which one you want, either the 10-minute old or the 20-minute old set.  That's really for you to know depending on the circumstances.

 

More often than not you'll want the most recent files.

[Michelle Logan]

Wim,

 

I have a question about the backups.

 

If we are doing an hourly backup, plus the Progressive Backups (@ 15 min intervals), what happens when the hourly and the progressive happen at the same time?

 

Would there be an issue using a backup from the Progressive, if the above scenario happened?

 

Thanks,

 

Michelle

 

We are still testing  FMS 13

[Wim Decorte]

The server machine itself will be very busy when the two "collide" but otherwise there is no issue.  They are both separate processes.

 

These collisions can't really be avoided because the progressive backup process starts when FMS starts so the interval is always relative to the FMS startup time, whereas the normal backup is on a fixed timed schedule.

[opencirrus]

Apologies for jumping into this rather old thread. Wim I've read your narrative on the backup's (ref V12), very useful thanks. I'm not using progressive backups at the moment, I schedule a complete backup once a day during the night when the server is quiet, and keep the last 3 days using a batch file transfer to an external location. This is ok for our needs to be able to restore from 1-3 days ago.

 

I'm trying to understand two basic things:

 

- If I need to restore the data, presumably I only need to copy and paste the file and container folders directory to the correct location on the server (FMS13) and then open that file? When pasting this file and folders, I replace the (closed) files and folders with the previous version? I'm assuming this keeps the links to the container files intact? I am going about this the correct way, or is there a better restore method?

 

- Occasionally, I like to take a copy of the DB offline (off the server) and work on a problem locally - for this I close the file and download within FMS13 and extract and open this with FM13A. However this means that I need to close the DB each time I do this, throwing users out temporarily. If there a way of using one of my backups sets to get the latest copy onto my local machine - as I think the correct method is to download from FMS?

[Wim Decorte]

Your general restore process is correct.

 

As to taking a local file, you could use the admin console to manually run a backup and then grab the backup.  That grabbing the backup can not be done from the admin console, you need access to the server machine itself for that.

[opencirrus]

Thanks Wim, my problem is that if I grab a backup and run this locally - the container paths are no longer valid, all my container files are missing. This only works if I close then download the file using FMS, which is what I'm trying to avoid.

 

Could this be something to do with how I have the external paths setup? I've noticed that in the DB files are stored within RC_Data_FMS/Filename, but not locally.

[Wim Decorte]

Yes, RC data path as slightly different when hosted on FMS.  A quick way to "fix" this is to have the file locally, add a new record and add something to the container.  See where FM puts that new RC data and then move the other folders and files into the same structure