Jerry Lawson asks:

>We have some large (at least by my estimate) Notes DBs that are very active.
>The data bases are on the order of 300 to 400 MB.  We currectly back them up
>completely each night; the Notes server has close to 20GB of DASD, and takes
>about 7 hours to back up each night.  We had thought about the Notes agent,
>but were skeptical, based on reports we had heard that said that the Notes
>agent was very slow, due to the overhead imposed by the API and its interface
>with Notes.

>Do you have any performance numbers on the Notes Agent?

No, I do not have any performance numbers for the Notes Agent. However, as
with just about everything else, the correct answer is "it depends".

About the Notes Agent being slow - yes, on a byte-for-byte basis, it is slower
than using the regular OS/2 backup-archive client. The benefit is derived from
using the Notes Agent for daily incremental backups of your Lotus Notes data-
bases. For example, if you have a very large database of which only a fraction
of the data changes, it might be faster to use the Notes Agent to back up the
changed data only, rather than backing up the entire database with the normal
backup-archive client. The other benefit is that you have recovery capability
down to the document level.

Your best bet for successful use of the Notes Agent would be to implement a
full backup of your Notes database(s) with the OS/2 backup-archive client on,
say, a weekly or bi-weekly (or whatever) basis, in tandem with daily
incremental backups using the Lotus Notes Backup Agent. This way, in the
event that a full restore is required, you can restore the database to the
state that it was in as of a particular date with the OS/2 backup-archive
client, followed by an incremental restore of all new and changed documents
from the date the full backup was taken.

Hope this helps,

Andy Raibeck
ADSM Level 2 Support