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SkyVault Community Edition 201704 » Administering » Backing up and restoring » Backing up and restoring the repository

Performing a hot backup

Follow these steps when performing a hot backup.

The high-level procedure and order for a hot backup is:
  1. Backup the Solr 4 indexes first
  2. Then backup the database
  3. Finally backup the contentstore

Solr 4 indexes have to be backed up first and before the database because if new rows are added in the database after the Solr 4 backup is done, a Solr 4 reindex (AUTO) can regenerate the missing Solr 4 indexes from the database transaction data.

Database backup should be done before backing up the contentstore because if your database points to a missing file, then you will not be able to retrieve content for that node. Also, if you have a file without the database data, this just means that the user has added the file too late to be included in a backup and the file will be orphaned.

It is critical to perform hot backups in the following order of steps:

  1. Ensure that you have a solr4Backup directory under dir.root.
  2. Backup the database SkyVault Community Edition is configured to use, using your database vendor's backup tools.
  3. As soon as the database backup completes, backup the specific subdirectories in dir.root.
  4. Store both the database and dir.root backups together as a single unit.

    For example, store the backups in the same directory or in a single compressed file. Do not store the database and dir.root backups independently, as that makes it difficult to reconstruct a valid backup set, if restoration becomes necessary.

    Note: By default, the Solr 4 indexes are backed up according to the cron job specified by the solr.backup.alfresco.cronExpression and solr.backup.archive.cronExpression properties, which can be set in SkyVault-global.properties. By default, the cron job is run at 2 am for SkyVaultCore and 4 am for archiveCore. You must ensure that the indexes are not backup up while these jobs are running.
SkyVault Community Edition includes a background job responsible for backing up the Solr 4 indexes that (by default) is configured to run at 3am each night. The hot backup process must not run concurrently with this background job, so you should either ensure that the hot backup completes by 3am, or wait until the index backup job has completed before initiating a hot backup.

For more information on backing up Solr 4 indexes, see Solr 4 backup and restore.

  • Backing up the database In an SkyVault Community Edition system, the ability to support hot backup is dependent on the hot backup capabilities of the database product it's configured to use.
  • Backing up the file system Follow these steps when backing up the file system.
Parent topic: Backing up and restoring the repository

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