Do Cloverleaf backups have to be a Hobson’s Choice?

[Vince Angulo]

We are currently on Cloverleaf 5.4 with AIX 5.3. Any advice or commentary would be appreciated…

Until recently we’ve had a backup process of bringing down sites daily for 20-30 minutes for incremental backups and Sundays for about an hour to do full back ups.

In the spring we implemented ER and surgical patient management applications that couldn’t tolerate the down time.  We now do what I think is common, leave the sites running and either exempt some of the exec directories or ignore backup errors due to locked SMAT or DB files.

Our systems lead has now been warned by Healthvision not to back up the system without shutting down the daemons, processes, and threads on each site, citing the danger of DB corruption.

This has some in the head shed thinking we might want to look at a different interface engine solution that supports robust back ups with no interruption to service.

This all seems a little excessive to me…

Topic

[Michael Hertel]

We don’t worry about “db corruption” because if we were to restore from a backup, that we would reinit the databases before starting them up.

[Rob Abbott]

Vince – this advice from Support may have come from a problems with backup solution that was locking the database files and causing issues with the lockmanager.

If your backup solution doesn’t lock any files and can run successfully alongside the engine/lockmanager then you shouldn’t have to shut everything down.

The other option is to exclude the exec/databases/ from your backup to avoid any conflicts.

Hope this helps.  We will be happy to work through this with you – we certainly don’t want to lose customers on an issue like this!

Rob Abbott
Cloverleaf Emeritus

[Vince Angulo]

Thanks for the rapid and assuring response!  I will forward it immediately to the ThePowersThatBe.

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