Appliance Backup and Restore

Backup and recovery is an important part of any enterprise system and it is expected that backup and recovery related to CCLAS is part of an overall backup and recovery strategy for the customer’s organisation. This section provides information around backup requirements and restoring.

Datamine recommends organisations should bed down their backup and restore approach and ensure that they have it operational (tried and tested) before ever needing it. Datamine has found that mature organisations regularly review and test these procedures to ensure they are reliable when needed.

CCLAS is designed so that only the CCLAS database and any SAN allocated to CCLAS needs to be backed up by the customer. Lost installations can be created and linked to the original data or a copy of the data, whichever is available.

Appliance Backup Requirements

This section provides a list of file systems to be backed up in order to recover an Appliance from a disaster or other critical failure (which may or may not involve some data loss). There are 3 main categories or types of artefacts that must be backed up. They include:

  1. Deployment Configuration
  2. Non-SQL Persistent Data
  3. Datamine Supplied and Third-party Software

Also, a deployment infrastructure restore procedure is provided:

It is outside the scope of this document to recommend any specific backup technique or how frequently backups should be taken. Nevertheless, it is important to remind customers that loss of data or configuration information can still occur. The extent of data loss is usually a function of factors such as (but not limited to) the date of the last backup or the quality/integrity of the data being backed up.

It should seem obvious, but is stated anyway, that backups should NOT be stored on the Appliance.

Finally, it is of critical importance to remind customers that in most organisations, the mere placement of artefacts on a SAN does not mean they are being backed up. If you want the files you put on SAN to be backed up you should establish a process with your IT / storage administration group in your organisation. Datamine recommends placement of files on SAN only as means of externalising important data away from the Appliance that must be persisted between deployments over time and which cannot be rebuilt automatically.