The backup process gives the user the facility to take a snapshot of the PostgreSQL database used by a remote server.
The backup is a representation of the entire database at the time the backup occurs. Backups can be executed manually or scheduled automatically. It may be initiated as a standalone database-only process, but is often part of a comprehensive Clarify backup strategy.
The database backup also allows you to specify how many concurrent jobs to run while backing up the database. This allows for performance tweaking on large databases or high performance multi core systems. The sample scripts that initiate the backup are provided in the Clarify installation. The database backup produces a directory containing files that represent the snapshot of the database. This directory can then be moved to another location or machine. The restore process will use this directory and its contained files to create a database identical to the initial database at the time the backup was run.
Database Backup Result
The backup creates a directory in the <Server Install>\backups folder.
This directory - POSTGRES_DB_BACKUP -contains a number of .gz files (Approx 148) of various size. These roughly represent one file per table plus a Table of Contents file (.toc). The size of this directory is dependent on the size of the Clarify database.
Once the POSTGRES_DB_BACKUP directory is created it can be copied /moved by a process of the users choosing, for instance, by the file system backup process. If thePOSTGRESS_DB_BACKUP directory has already been created when a subsequent backup is run, it deletes the directory and lays down a new one. This means the backup essentially overwrites the directory each time the script is run.
For this reason the POSTGRES_DB_BACKUP directory in the backups folder always represents a snapshot of the database based on the last time the backup was executed.
Backup logs generated
When using the backup_db_execute.bat script, log files will be generated in the \<Server Install>\utils\logs folder. These log files should be added to the customers overall system cleanup strategy and purged periodically from the system.
The backup_db_execute.bat can be easily modified to perform other tasks (email notification, archiving) based on successful or unsuccessful completion of the backup (see comments in the script).
Incorporating Database Backup as part of larger strategy
The database backup must not be run independently. The database backup must be run as part of a larger Clarify backup effort (database and file system). The intention is not only to back up the database but also other important or essential data persisted in various locations of the Clarify install.
When including a database backup as part of your backup strategy, always run the database backup first. This allows the resultant backup directory (POSTGRES_DB_BACKUP folder) to be included as part of the file system backup process (of your choosing).
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