-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello,
I happen to work as Lotus Domino Administrator in my primary job so I'll take the liberty to add some comments. Christoff Buch wrote:
what I need to know is: Can they be backed up with bacula while opened?
We've always used open file backups for as long as I've worked here (not with Bacula though) and that is usually sufficient. It does not ensure consistency though (you'd have to shut down the system for that). You can alleviate that by having Domino write all its buffers (give it a 'dbcache flush' command on the console) and then avoiding any activity that touches databases but there is no way you can ensure that it completely stops writting to its databases.
Can the use of VSS be of any advantage? (Is it at all possible with *.nsfs?)
VSS could help if you were to shut down Domino (to get all databases to consistent sate), then take the VSS snapshot and bring it back up while the backups run in the background. I'm not sure Domino itself would respond to a VSS request (is it a VSS writer? No clue, if anybody can tell me a non-disruptive test to determine that, I'd be willing to do it on one of our Windows devel systems). Alternatively, starting with R5, IBM/Lotus have introduced transaction loggint and a proprietary backup API that allow Domino servers to be backed up online and incremantally. (Domino is notorious in touching and changing files all the time so file based incremental backups tend to come to the equivalent of a full backup) For those familiar with Domino, I'm talking about the 'archive' transaction log, not the 'circular' one which is merely there for quicker/smoother server recovery in case of crashes and in some cases performance. I'm not too familiar with Oracle but I think it follows the concept of their redo logs: It basically takes all the databases and instead of writting to them directly, writes out transactions to the transaction logs first. When one of the logs is full, Domino opens a new one and continues to write to that. To back up the databases, the Backup agent has to first grab all the databases themselves (ie the .nsf files) and then grab all the closed logs that go along with them. Once it has done that, it notifies Domino of the backup completion which causes the latter to flush the logs to the actual databases and delete them (the logs that is). In later incremental backups, you only need to grab the current (closed) logs which, in case of a restore, you can use to redo all the transactions since the last full file backup. (N.B. some operations change the database structure, forcing a full backup of the file. I don't know whether the backup API allows to detect that, all I know is that Domino outputs a warning concerning it on the console) This backup API is probably non-trivial to implement. I couldn't find any documentation on it right now (it may be hidden somewhere on http://notes.net or on IBMs website but it could also be restricted to IBMs partners) and I even know many commercial products that do not support it (or don't support it under all platforms that Domino runs on). If the aforementioned file backups are sufficient for you and you can afford to have big incrementals then that shouldn't be a problem. If you fear about the consistency (in my 5 years of working with it, I've never had a single issue with the open files getting backed up during the night) you might investigate downing your server and using snapshots (under Linux, LVM could help you there, or if you have a SAN you could investigate whatever your storage vendor has to offer in that respect). Greetings, Michel -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) - GPGrelay v0.959 iD8DBQFD/yc+2Vs+MkscAyURAhbMAJ0fdYB1aVkqeE2gHKuspIl9NoxaywCglwe+ xMiU4nfJgLCTRexMOYPTLL0= =2I0A -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
