Jerry Lawson writes:
>We are backing up some Lotus Notes Servers as a straight OS/2 backup(not
>using the Notes client) since the DBs are very big and very active. Some of
>the data bases never get backed up, as they are 500MB each, and always
>changing. (We have the serialization set to Shared Static). In the ADSM
>Notes documentation, it suggests the Shared Static serialization,but since we
>are never getting a backup, the Notes administrator wants to know what the
>exposure is to his Notes database if we switch to a straight dynamic (fuzzy)
>backup. Does anyone know anything about Notes to comment on this?
>BTW, to clarify something I stated on Friday, Lotus is requiring OS/2 fix pack
>17 as a minimum maintenance level for Release 4 Notes servers. If you are
>using ADSM to backup a Notes server, be sure you have the IC12349 code
>installed on ADSM. I also heard that other vendors will be using this release
>as a minimum requirement in the future.
>Associated with the Static backup mentioned above, we saw in the log the
>messages indicating the data had changed, and the backup was being retried.
>We noticed one odd thing-in each message, the size of the data base was
>reported the same. My Notes administrator thought this strange - could there
>be a bug in how the message is being formatted (the size not being replaces,
>perhaps?) I told him that it could be the date/time stamp changing, but
>unfortunately that information is not displayed, and I can't think of an easy
>way to view this from an Administrator's level.
>Anyone have any comments or suggestions?
As far as fuzzy backups of Notes databases, I think it is
a risky thing to do. A Notes database can be updated for a number
of reasons. some examples are: (1) someone just adding some data,
(2) a replication job is sync'ing the database with another server,
and (3) someone is changing the non-data design elements. There
are many other possibilities. Whether or not the fuzzy backup will
be valid depends on what was happening at the time of the backup.
A fairly "good" scenario would be that a single document within the
database was corrupted but can be removed with the rest of the
database unaffected. I doubt a "good" scenario will always happen,
though. Lotus Notes does have a fixup utility that essentially deletes
corrupted data from a database, but I don't know if it will handle
all the possibilities that a fuzzy backup might present.
Also, as far as the database size not changing, I think it is
possible for a Note database to change "internally" even though the
database itself does not shrink or grow. The database appears to have
a sort of buffer zone. For example, a database might be 50 MB,
but only 90% in use. Also, I think there are some time/date values
that could possibly change without necessarily changing the database
size.
Debbie Masada
ADSM
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