To Use a Third Party Backup Software (Besides Legato)

Messaging Server provides two message store backup solutions, the command line imsbackup and the Solstice Backup (Legato Networker). A large message store running a single imbackup to backup the entire message store can take a significant amount of time. The Legato solution supports concurrent backup sessions on multiple backup devices. Concurrent backup can shorten backup time dramatically (backups of 25GB of data per hour have been achieved).

If you are using another third party concurrent backup software (for example, Netbackup), you may use the following method to integrate your backup software with the Messaging Server.

To Use a Third Party Backup Software (Besides Legato)

Steps

1. Divide your users into groups (see To Create Backup Groups) and create a backup-groups.conf file under the directory msg_svr_base/config/.

   ---

   Note –

   This backup solution requires additional disk space. To backup all the groups concurrently, the disk space requirement is 2 times the message store size. If you do not have that much disk space, divide your users into smaller groups, and then backup a set of groups at a time. For example group1 - group5, group6 - group10. Remove the group data files after backup.

   ---

2. Run imsbackup to backup each group into files under a staging area.

   The command is imsbackup -f <device> /<instance>/<group>

   You can run multiple imsbackup processes simultaneously. For example:

   # imsbackup -f- /primary/groupA > /bkdata/groupA & # imsbackup -f- /primary/groupB > /bkdata/groupB & . . .

   imsbackup does not support large files, if the backup data is larger than 2 GB, you need to use the -f- option to write the data to stdout and then pipe the output to a file.

3. Use your third party backup software to backup the group data files in the staging area (in our example that is /bkdata).

4. To restore a user, identify the group filename of the user, restore that file from tape, and then use imsrestore to restore the user from the data file.

   Note that imsrestore does not support large files. If the data file is larger than 2GB. Use the following command:

   # cat /bkdata/groupA | imsrestore -f- /primary/groupA/andy