I'm looking for ideas on how everyone backs up there workgroup PDM vault. My vault folder is now about 100GB.
I'm looking for ideas on how everyone backs up there workgroup PDM vault. My vault folder is now about 100GB.
Dave,
However, from experience if, you file folder is 100GB, backing it up manually, will take hours. Years ago, I worked for a company who backed up everything on to CD's (talk about a nightmare when you have 20-30 gb of info). Then they moved to a DVD backup, still a PITA, but it was better when you could get double what the DVD would call for. They later moved to a backup server which cut out hours of backing up on my part. I have found having the folder on the main server or having it linked to the server will save time and energy. Just make sure the IT guy, actually links the folder to be backup daily at least twice or more for those unexpected issues (someone deletes a very important file from PDM). My current company has given me my own harddrive to store my files, nearly 2 TB.
I make 3 backups of our PDMVault every night.
I use a selfmade script based on robocopy (Microsoft freeware) that copies the entire VaultData directory to:
* an external USB disk (i have 5 disks - 1 for every day; regularly I take one offsite, and replace it with an empty one)
* another server where PDM Workgroup is installed (the server is not used, just on standby)
* another server where I copy all backups from all servers to (there is no PDM Workgroup on this server)
I do not stop the PDMWorkgroup service while making the backups, I am 100% certain that noone is using the Vault while I make the backups.
The advantage of using robocopy is:
* it skips files that are in use (e.g. the server.log file) and proceeds with the next one
* when copying files from A to B, it only replaces files on location B that have been changed since the last copy (i.e. new files, updated files, deleted files). All files that are the same, will be skipped. This greatly reduces the time it takes to copy the Vault.
-> our vault is about 250 GB in size
-> it takes about 7 hours to copy the entire vault to an empty USB disk
-> it takes about 2 hours to copy the entire vault to a disk that contains last week's backup
-> it takes about 2 hours to copy the entire vault to the other servers (which already contain yesterday's backup)
Of course I have tested this scenario, and it works.
If I start up the backup server (the one which already contains PDM Workgroup) all I have to do is start the PDM service, rebuild/revalidate the vault and we're ready to go.
Our vault is stored on a company server and it is backed up as part of the overall corporate backup plan. 100GB is pretty big - I assume from the question that it has never been backed up? It is pretty simple - just shut down the service (requires admin rights) and copy the entire folder to a new location with a new name. Just like copying a folder.