Daniel Nashed's Blog

Domino Backup/Restore with multiple configurations and targets

Domino Back/Restore is a flexible framework for native Domino backup.
The dominobackup.nsf plays an important role for backup and restore operation.

It contains the following type of content.

• Backup/restore/prune configuration
• Inventory documents for restore operations
• Restore requests
• Backup logs

You could run backup with different excludes defined on command-line.
Or just backup selected databases or incremental backups.
But there cannot be different active configurations nor different backup retention in one dominobackup.nsf


A server can only have one active backup configuration?

That's generally true. And this makes most sense for most customer environments and keeps it simple.
Specially when using VSS Writer initiated backup, it would be too complicated to run different type of backups.
Also when using archive style transaction logs and incremental backups, there should be only one backup.
But for full backups initiated by Domino Backup there could be situations where multiple backups might be desired.


Coexistence and migration

Also when switching from one backup integration to another backup integration you want to ensure you can still restore your backups.
For that reason Domino Backup & Restore servertasks support the -configdb parameter which allows to specify a different database on command line.
When migrating to another backup solution, the old database could be renamed and a new database for the new dominobackup.nsf implementation would be put in place.
The old database could be still used for restores.

An admin would select old backups from the old inventor and create a restore request in the old database.
The command-line would just need to reference the old Domino Backup database.
The same parameter works for taking a backup. The database determines the configuration and also contains logs and the inventory.
The -configdb parameter is in already the initial implementation from day one for Domino 12.0.


Limitations

Please use this parameter with care and only for the type of configurations where it makes sense.
The VSS Writer implementation always has to use the main configuration.
And only one backup configuration can be used for archive style backup.


Example command lines

load backup -configdb backup2.nsf
load restore -configdb backup2.nsf


Note

The restore action in the UI always performs are restore without additional parameters and would not work in the second database.
But it could be customized to include the current database in the console command invocation.


My production environment

I am going to introduce the new version of BorgBackup to my production servers soon.
Today I am taking a full backup to a ZFS deduplicating and compressing target twice a day.  
But I probably I will move one of those backups to a BorgBackup target on a Hetzner Storage box.

-- Daniel

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