Monday, December 12, 2005

Domino Backup

One of the problems I'm working on at the moment is online backup of a Lotus Domino server running on Solaris.

Nothing too complicated, right? Just whip out your favourite backup solution , install the domino module, and you're good to go. Right? Wrong!

I've tried Legato Networker, which I've used for regular backups without any problems for the best part of a decade. Works on a trivial test, fails completely on the real thing. I've tried Backup Express from Syncsort (used by our PC systems) and haven't yet managed to persuade it to recognise that I've got a domino server installed.

I stumbled across BakBone, who make something called NetVault. I had never heard of it, but first impressions from the web site were good, and I was able to get an eval copy off their download site straight away. Installed pretty easily, and it wasn't too hard to work out how to drive it, so it's currently doing a test backup. (Performance isn't too bad, especially considering I've set it up to save to a disk based virtual library on the same disk array that the Domino server lives on.)

The real test, of course, is to wipe the Domino server out completely and see what happens if you restore it. More on that phase as it happens.

1 comment:

Peter Tribble said...

It doesn't really solve the fundamental problem, which is how to get the information out of domino in the first place. IBackup knows how to do this for MS SQL Server and Exchange, but that's about it.

This is the problem - not storing the data, but getting it out of Domino while it's still offering a live service.

It would also be quite expensive for the data volumes we're talking about - the largest offering on the pricelist is many times smaller than we would need to save every night.