Bim Server Backup

[Anonymous]

I am wondering how other people are managing their BIM server backups in combination with online backup and by this i mean, if the whole server falls over and I need to reinstall.

There are some good articles to explain this

http://www.archicadwiki.com/Teamwork/BIMServerBackupScripts

http://www.archicadwiki.com/Teamwork/BIMServerBackupScriptPC

The problem lies in the time taken to transfer a few projects databases across in one hit. In our case the time is running longer than when people stop work at night and start in the morning. And even if it was achievable to transfer a few of the projects, there are also critical information stored in ancillary files. Ideally it would be good to transfer the whole server in one night.

We have come up with a few workaround such as copy the whole server firstly onto another drive, then transfer this to the online backup while everyone is working on the original.

Is everyone else accomplishing this through physical drive or tape backup only?

[Ed_Brown]

Mark,

If I understand you correctly, your backup is taking all night to complete?

There are a few possibilities:
1) A few hotfixes back in AC 14 the backups of the projects were also packaged up by default. This could add significant GBs to the backup and time
2) You are purposefully adding the backups with the -include-manual-backups or -include-automatic-backups parameters
3) You are directing the output of the commands directly to a network drive or worse yet a tape drive. (it is much faster to send them to a temporary holding place on the drive of the machine hosting the BIM Server and then from there copying them to backup device.
4) you're combining the above

One other trick, if you are running the commands by hand on a one time basis is to actually stop the bim server application and then run the backup command(s). You cannot go back to running mode until the backup has completed, but this will make the backup run fast.

Hope that is helpful,

Ed

[Anonymous]

Thanks Ed, that all helps. I will have a look at these and see if we can get the time taken to backup reduced.