Backup Checker

Working in support, I usually get asked how many days I should keep journals. Should it be two days or after two backups? More? Less? Why two?

The correct answer (for most of the environments) is that you should keep the journals since the last validated Backup. I.e., until you don’t check if a Backup is valid (restoring the file and checking with the Integrity utility), you can’t be sure there is a good copy of your data and can’t purge the journals safely.

The only way to make sure that your backups are valid is by checking them! And for checking, I mean restoring the databases and validating the data on them. The way to check the data inside a database is by using the Integrity utility.

When I explain this, most administrators consider it a complex task, which takes a lot of time and is hard to automate. So, I decided to build a super simple Backup checker/validator that helps you validate Backups easily. I am uploading the utility to the open exchange site.

The utility is a simple Backup checker/validator for Backups done with InterSystems Iris. It will restore your Backup file (.cbk) automatically and will run an integrity report afterward. All the “magic” is done in the restoreAll method of the Installer class. You can borrow the code and improve it to send you an email when it finishes with the results.

Once the Backup has been restored and the Integrity check run, the docker log (and messages.log) will contain the restore and integrity check results. The databases restored will appear in a Restore folder.

Requirements

• docker & docker-compose
• Iris backup file (FullDatabases.cbk)
• Enough space to restore the backup!

How to

Clone/git pull the repo into any local directory

git clone https://github.com/mariosanchez23/backupChecker.git

Add your Iris online backup file (.cbk) inside the Backup directory. Rename the backup file to “backup.cbk”. If you want to use a different name, look at the docker-compose.yml and change the environment variable.

Start the docker instance and watch the logs:

docker-compose up

If you want to repeat the check with another backup, replace the backup file and call the “cleanStart.sh” script

./cleanStart.sh

This script is a simple script that stops, removes previous restore and data and starts a new backup check. See:

docker-compose down
rm -Rf iris
rm -Rf Restore
docker-compose up

Notes

• You can’t validate Caché/Ensemble backups with this utility as it uses Iris, which does not support restoring backups from Caché/Ensemble. If you want to validate Caché or Ensemble backups, feel free to use the Installer class method and import it in a Caché/Ensemble instance and run it from there.

• You can edit the class Installer.cls to add your own code to email the results, create a file, etc… I wanted to keep the script as simple as possible.

• You can edit the cleanStart.sh script to automate the copy of your original backup file and start the process.

• Have in mind that restoring a big file will take a lot of time. The Integrity report will run with paralell process to complete faster, but will also take time. So once you run the checker, take a coffee, go for a walk and come back to see the results. The results are in the messages.log and also in the terminal or docker log.

Demo

This is a quick video of what you get (short video)