Re: Scheduling backup

the vault admin tool purposely leaves some areas very immature.  with the number of available sql tools it seemed best to leave some sql maintenance up to the user's discretion.  as eric's email noted, we've logged this as a feature request for future versions of vault.


with that said, it is not all that difficult to accomplish what you are looking for with the tools currently at your finger tips:

1)  if not already present, install windows scheduler on a machine which has access to the sql server hosting the vault database.

2)  it is probably the easiest to run a backup from a batch file... type this command (you will need to update the file with your specific information) into a windows batch file.  i've included one as a sample.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<< vaultbackup.cmd >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
osql -S (local) -E -Q "USE master; BACKUP DATABASE sgvault TO DISK='vaultbackup.bak' WITH DESCRIPTION='vault simple backup', INIT;"
<<<<<<<<<<<<<< vaultbackup.cmd >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

"backup database command" - see sql server's books online ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts_ba-bz_35ww.asp?frame=true ) 
"osql" - see "osql /?" at a command prompt.

3)  test the backup command -> execute the batch/command file.  if all is correct, the execution should make a full backup of the database.

4)  schedule the backup -> in this example, the vaultbackup.cmd file will run at 2:00 PM for every day of the week. the following command was run from a command prompt    C:\>  at \\MACHINE 14:00 /every:m,t,w,th,f "start c:\windows\vaultbackup.cmd"

see "at /?" for more information

5)  verify the schedule was created.  type "at" at a command prompt.  you should see your backup command.

6)  place security permissions on the backup file.  i would recommend placing read access (except for administrators) on the backup command file.


i know this is not simple as something included in a gui, but it should work as a "poor man's" backup scheduler.


jeff clausius
sourcegear 



*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 1/15/2004 at 10:18 AM Jeroen Schmitz wrote:

>We are running sourcegear vault in a small environment (only 5 users)
>and we are using msde (instead of sql server 2000) which works
>reasonably well so far. However, creating backups of the vault database
>in this setup is a bit limited I think. As far as I understand, the only
>possibility is to manually create a backup using the admin tool, but I
>would like to be able to automatically schedule a backup, on a daily
>basis for instance. It seems that vault doesn't have a feature for this.
>I know that if you have sql server you could achieve this by using the
>tools that come with that, but since we don't have sql server, that's
>not an option for us. Furthermore I feel that, even if you have sql
>server, as a vault user you shouldn't be required to have knowledge of
>the low-level tools that vault uses (like sql server) in order to create
>a backup schedule, it would be much better if the vault user interface
>provides all functions you need.
>Will something like this be implemented in the feature or am I missing
>something and is this already possible?
>
>Regards,
>Jeroen
>
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