By Larry Barker
Since the release of HCL Domino v12, your data has come with its own digital lifejacket - the Domino Backup and Restore feature. In environments where development is fast-paced and changes to code and design are frequent, losing data can be a significant setback. That's why the importance of being well-prepared cannot be overstated. In this post, we'll explore how Domino v12 and v14 enhance data security and why it's essential for maintaining the integrity of your development projects.
What is Domino Backup?
Out-of-the-box, Domino Backup focuses on providing a Domino-aware backup option that can be used directly for basic backup and restore actions or act as middleware and integrate with more robust, managed backup solutions. In both cases, it helps ensure the integrity of your backups of any Domino applications with active connections, which usually applies to development servers running Teamstudio development tools.
Domino Backup and Restore provides a range of flexible and powerful options for data protection:
Simple File System Backup: You can back up directly to a disk or network drive.
Third-Party Integration: It allows integration with third-party backup solutions, including those capable of fast, snapshot-based backups of the entire file system.
Point-in-Time Database Restore: Using Domino transaction logs combined with full backups enables you to restore a database to a specific point in time.
Versatile Restore Options: You can restore a database to a chosen point in time, recover a deleted database to its original location, or even restore deleted documents or folders back into their original database.
However, the Domino Backup feature concentrates primarily on data and does not provide any direct management capability in terms of design. However, if you are using Teamstudio CIAO! to manage your Domino development activity, all design and development history can be included within your Domino backups. In case of data loss, the full development history can be restored in place by including your Teamstudio CIAO log files within the Domino backup routines. In fact, this will be true for all Teamstudio products that use templates for various aspects of their feature sets.
Backing up databases generated from any of the above Teamstudio templates is strongly recommended.
Backing Up the Teamstudio NSF Components
The HCL Domino Backup feature is designed to comprehensively back up all NSF files on the Domino server, which means it automatically includes your Teamstudio product NSFs. The upcoming release of HCL Domino 14 will enhance this capability by allowing you to back up the Notes.ini file as well. This addition will enable the inclusion of any Teamstudio .ini entries used in products like CIAO!, ensuring a more complete backup.
Getting started is relatively straightforward:
1. Create and initialize the 'Dominobackup.nsf' that manages the configuration, restore and other aspects of the service by issuing a 'load backup' command on the Domino server console.
The dominobackup.nsf is created during the first ‘load backup’ console command.
2. Once generated, open the 'Dominobackup.nsf' database 'Configuration' view, selecting the document specific to your platform.
3. The system automatically populates necessary default values. For instance, on the Windows platform, the Main tab appears as shown below. It's worth noting that while the displayed backup directories don't need to pre-exist, the server should have the required permissions to create both directories and files.
If the default target folders are not appropriate you can set them to your required paths and they will be automatically generated.
4. For example, launch a backup by issuing a console command 'load backup' a second time to initiate a 'Full' backup of your NSFs. You could also target a specific NSF like your CIAO! log by amending the command to something like 'load backup ciao\ciaolog', specifying the path to your CIAO! log.
A summary of the backup job settings and log will be captured.
There are more advanced backup options and modes available for use depending on your requirements that you may read more about on the HCL Product Documentation site.
Restoring a CIAO! Log
To expand upon our example specific to CIAO!, if we wanted to use the Domino restore capability to recover all of our previously captured development version managment history, we could simply follow these steps:
1. Open dominobackup.nsf and navigate to the 'Database Inventory'. Locate and open the document corresponding to the ciaolog.nsf selected earlier.
2. Click on the 'Restore' button.
3. In the 'Selected backup' field, choose the most recent backup time from the options provided.
Select a source backup set for the recovery job by clicking on the dropdown arrow.
4. Click 'Submit Restore' to initiate the process.
5. Finally, either click 'Run Restore Server Cmd' or manually enter 'load restore' at the server console to complete the restoration.
This will restore your CIAO! Log to the specified folder in your Domino Backup settings, but you will still need to ensure that CIAO! knows the location of the recovered log. You have a few options in this regard:
If the previous CIAO! log was deleted, renamed or moved. You can simply relocate the recovered log back into its original location.
Relocate the recovered CIAO! log to your desired location and reconfigure any applications previously using that log to the new path within the CIAO! configuration database used by your CIAO! clients.
CIAO! Configuration database entry specifying the CIAO! log location.
For backing up other Teamstudio product components that use NSFs, you can apply a similar process. However, it's worth noting that HCL Domino Backup and Restore offers additional features tailored to various use cases. You might want to explore further to understand and use these capabilities fully.
Some valuable resources for further information include:
And if you have access to 'HCLSoftware U' they have a short course on the features as well: HCLSoftware U: Domino V12 Backup and Restore
Teamstudio's products play a vital role in various stages of the Software Development Life Cycle, from code analysis and documentation to build release and version management. The loss of crucial configuration, analysis data, or historical version information can be a significant setback. If you're using HCL Domino 12 or a later version for your Domino development servers, it's essential to take advantage of this highly beneficial backup feature to safeguard your data.