BIM server + Back ups + Time Machine

[Anonymous]

So I read the wiki article on data safety and came away more confused...

This is what we do now.... Our .pln files sit on an external mirrored RAID drive attached to a Mac Mini that acts as our file server... This works great and I'm pretty sure I should install BIM server on the mini and all will be well... I also assume that setting up BIM server to keep the files and libraries on the RAID drive is fine... I just don't know how back-ups should work... Currently, Time machine backs up the mini and the RAID hourly and then weekly I bring an external drive to back up the RAID drive for off site...

So these are my questions.

Are there any BIM server files that I should not let Time Machine backup, can any of the BIM server files be corrupted by Time Machine?

What BIM server files (other than project/libraries) do I want to make sure make it onto the weekly off site back-up?

Any other ideas?

thanks

[Aussie John]

From my quick read of the wiki article a backup of the BIM server will not guarantee a good backup unless it is stopped first. Obviously Time machine is not in a position to do this. It does seem though that the BIM server can do backups on a schedule. I would think these files may safely be restored from a Time Machine backup.

This is similar to filemaker server which can schedule database backups and it is these that are recommended to be used to restore. In both cases the problem is writing to the file during a backup. OS X Server system files can also be in the same boat. I am not sure how TM handles this with "normal files" but there you go!! AFAIK TM doesnt corrupt original files but as said before the copied file might not be of use.

Also I'm not sure how you are doing your offsite backup but you can't just drag a copy of Time machine files to another disk and you need to use an app like carbon copy clone or Super duper. Unless of course your TM backup is already a sparsebundle file. (which it will be if backed up over a network and not a locally connected drive.)

The wiki lists which files are essential to be backed up.

All this is said with no experience with the BIM server or Archicad 13 so caveats apply.

With files getting larger all the time backup is a right pain particularly for offsite. A clone copy of 0.5TB server might take 20 hours. One way around this is to have two identical Time Machine disks also with the same name and rotate them on/off site.

I'd be interested to hear any others comments re backup.

[Haneef Tayob]

For external and a more long term backup solution, I've made a point to manually and regularly export teamwork projects on the BIM Server to the "teamwork portable package" format using the BIM Server Manager. It seems I can easily import this into a new teamwork project.

It's unfortunately not automated, but is less tedious than opening each project and resaving it as a solo project format.

I'll still rely on the scheduled backups the BIM Server automatically creates for day to day securing of info.

[Anonymous]

Aussie wrote:
This is similar to filemaker server which can schedule database backups and it is these that are recommended to be used to restore. In both cases the problem is writing to the file during a backup. OS X Server system files can also be in the same boat. I am not sure how TM handles this with "normal files" but there you go!! AFAIK TM doesnt corrupt original files but as said before the copied file might not be of use.

Also I'm not sure how you are doing your offsite backup but you can't just drag a copy of Time machine files to another disk and you need to use an app like carbon copy clone or Super duper. Unless of course your TM backup is already a sparsebundle file. (which it will be if backed up over a network and not a locally connected drive.)

The wiki lists which files are essential to be backed up.

All this is said with no experience with the BIM server or Archicad 13 so caveats apply.

With files getting larger all the time backup is a right pain particularly for offsite. A clone copy of 0.5TB server might take 20 hours. One way around this is to have two identical Time Machine disks also with the same name and rotate them on/off site.

I'd be interested to hear any others comments re backup.

Our time machine backup doesn't have anything really to do with the weekly off-site back up. The weekly off site is just a clone of the 0.5TB RAID drive... Since it just rewrites the changed files since the last back up and we are a small office it is usually only several GB. It takes about an hour a week... When it becomes too time consuming we'll figure something else out..

We also run filemaker server and I know it has some files that we have specifically stopped time machine from backing up for fear that TM could corrupt the original files. FM server runs it's own backups several times a day and those are manually backed up to the RAID drive right before we do the weekly backup... I assume that BIM server will work similarly, this is why I'm concerned with what files I should not let Time Machine back up while BIM server is running.

[Aussie John]

SteveC0013 wrote:

Aussie wrote:
We also run filemaker server and I know it has some files that we have specifically stopped time machine from backing up for fear that TM could corrupt the original files. FM server runs it's own backups several times a day and those are manually backed up to the RAID drive right before we do the weekly backup... I assume that BIM server will work similarly, this is why I'm concerned with what files I should not let Time Machine back up while BIM server is running.

The active server files may not copy correctly during a TM backup but I dont believe it will cause corruption of the original file. Our database files are copied during the TM backup and have not had any issues. I'm saying dont rely on them for restore. If you are still worried about backing up these files why dont you set your application scheduled copies to a separate folder which is backed up by TM.

[Anonymous]

Aussie wrote:
The active server files may not copy correctly during a TM backup but I dont believe it will cause corruption of the original file. Our database files are copied during the TM backup and have not had any issues. I'm saying dont rely on them for restore. If you are still worried about backing up these files why dont you set your application scheduled copies to a separate folder which is backed up by TM.

When you say database files are you talking about your project files or part of the BIM server?

[Aussie John]

Steve - I was talking about our filemaker database files but also any file that might change during a copy process especially server files which can be written to frequently.

[Anonymous]

I'm Back..

So we've just finally started using BIM Server (19). It is set up on its own machine that won't be used for anything else... BIM Server does its own scheduled project back-ups so that is good...

I'd still like to use time machine to back-up the machine setup and am still confused about what files if any of the BIM Server I should exclude from Time Machine.

Also, what off sight back-up strategies are people using and liking?

thanks

[schagemann]

Here my 2 cents worth:

1. timemachine is problematic as it is not easy to control when it runs - we use carbon copy cloner (CCC) instead;

2. run the CCC backup after hours, with a preflight script to stop and post flight script to start the BIM Server, if you must;

3. we also adjust the BIM Server backup settings to only do PLN backups, to ensure that in case of catastrophic failure, you at least have PLNs that you can use even without a BIMSERVER... note PLN backups are typically bigger in size than BIMSERVER backups;

4. we also choose to run backups after hours (not all at once at 1600h - really not sure how graphisoft determined that that might be good time to have all TW projects backup at the same time...)

5. depending on your servers capacity and the number / size of your typical projects, carefully monitor that you do not run out of space (and risk corruption of the bimservers mongo database) - unfortunately there is no way to globally adjust the default backup settings easily, i.e. it is a manual process that requires regular checking to ensure that nobody has shared a 4GB file with the default backup settings;

6. offsite backups are essential but depend on your willingness to rotate backup drives / tapes offsite (we do it daily) or your internet connection bandwidth for cloud based backups and required restoration times (we do tapes and hard drives);

...one last thing to keep in mind regarding the frequency of BIM Server backups: if your practice works in large teams and you need to restore or roll back a project file (e.g. if a single user gets detached), we find that hourly backups are not really that useful, as you loose as many man hours as there are team members if you reset the project for the whole team (rather than just forfeiting a single users work for the last couple of hours).

[Ravy]

Just resurrecting this old topic, as I couldn’t see a newer one.

Thought people might find it useful to know that TimeMachine partial restores of BimCloud do work. We had an issue with our Teamwork libraries, and attempted a restore of the entire “Attachments” folder in the BimCloud server’s directory.

Worked perfectly, other than needing an enormous amount of space.