Re: [p4] Questions regarding backup strategies for perforce servers

Posted on behalf of forum user 'Matt Janulewicz'.



[https://forums.perforce.com/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&section=findpost&pid=22407]
roadkills_r_us, on 2017/09/29 16:11:35 UTC, said:
>    If you're really concerned that it's perfect, but don't want to stop your server, set up a read/only replica. On the replica, set up a cron job to halt the p4d service, run your backups, and then restart the service. This is what I do for production servers.
>     
+1 for this. You might want to at least take a look at the SDP to see how it
works and what it does, maintenance-wise, and emulate that.

We (the SDP, actually, I didn't make any of this stuff up) keep a second
copy of the db (offline_db) on each of our servers, and maintain it by rotating
the journal every day and replaying it into the offline_db. This is where we
take weekly checkpoints from. We also destroy offline_db every week, rebuild it
with checkpoints and journals, then swap in the offline_db (plus live journal)
for the production instance. You'll want to do this once in a while anyway
so that your btrees don't become too unbalanced, empty space is compressed,
etc. Keeps things tidy.

In addition, all our important servers (commit plus edges) have two read-only
instances out and about, also with their own offline_db's and checkpoints.
This gives us at least three copies of all db's and checkpoints/journals out
there, including offline.

Anyhoo, my main point is that even if you only have one server, it's a very,
very good idea to have a second read-only partner out there to do maintenance
on, to recover data from, to run backups on and to use as a warm standby in case
your master server goes south. For those of us that have 30+ GB compressed
checkpoints, restoring pieces from this secondary server is much faster than
grabbing a traditional backup from tape and replaying an entire checkpoint.



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