Symposium Backup and HA options 1

[rmgt]

What options are there for Symposium server backup and how can I setup a cluster of it for High-Availability?

 

[rmgt]

Any help?

 

[HBurk]

Symposium has a backup program as part of the application. To backup the database information you need to use it, versus a 3rd party application. The blue database, among a few other things, will not be backed up if you attempt to do a full backup of the server using a third party backup program, unless you go in and shut down the SCCS services first(which takes the server offline and places all calls into default handling).

Best suggestion for a backup strategy with a Symposium would be once you have built the server and it's ready to go live(or schedule a time where you can take the server offline), get an image of the server that you could use in the future to restore. Then schedule your Symposium Backups, using the utility in Symposium, to backup to a network drive. Then on that network share, you can perform backup's normally. In the case of disaster recovery, you would just restore your image, then restore the backup database from the network share.

 

[rmgt]

but is there a way of having a standby server or something? the mean-time-between failure will be high in this case?!

 

[sandyml]

In Release 5.0 there is a standby server-replicator server option. In this setup, you can have 1 server actively handling calls, a backup server, and the replicator server keeps the databases of both current and synchronized automatically. You will still have a bit of downtime in case of failure, while you bring the standby server on line. You do have to purchase this option.

You can also consider a Stratus server, which is a high-availability server option that has been tested and approved for this product.

Release 6 will come out late this year, and I believe there will be improvements in this area. But that's in the future.

For now, with a standalone server, suggest that you get an initial full backup or image (note HBurk's comments -- the details on what needs to be shut down can be found in the Installation guide). Then schedule a Symposium online (partial) backup to a network share daily. This will give you the most recent historical stats and configuration. Also keep an up to date copy of your Symposium Platform Recovery disk on this network share. Your overall backup system can copy this folder and archive it on a regular basis. In case of failure, restore your image/full backup, then you can use your Platform Recovery and most recent online backup to bring yourself to current.