OS-X Server Backup

[icondaemon]

Hi all-

 

 

 

We just purchased R5(server version)to backup a new OSX Server (and a few 9&X clients as well). Currently the OSX server is doing fileserving, webserving & print spooling. Before I put the server into production, I've been experimenting with R5, but one question I haven't been able to find an answer to in either the documentation, Knowledgebase or elsewhere:

 

 

 

Is it necessary to shutdown fileserving & webserving for the backups? (I've been doing so just to be cautious, but I want to automate this process.)

 

 

 

Unfortunately, Server Admin is not AppleScript-able, so I can't approach this from that direction. I've also read in another posting here that Apple hasn't made any APIs available to disable fileserver logins. (I'm assuming that APIs for shutting down filesharing have also not been made available, too.)

 

 

 

Any help you can throw my way will be very helpful!

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

Derek Smith

 

Riverdale Country School

 

Bx, NY 10471

 

 

 

icon_demon@email.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Maser]

I've never shut off any of my services and haven't had a problem. Of course, I've not had a catastrophic failure, so I can't comment on it.

 

 

 

If you want to shut down the services at a specific time, though, you should probably set up a "cron" job request to stop/start the services at a specific time (ie, stop the services a midnight, let a scripted incremental backup run at 12:05, and then start the services at 1:00 a.m. (or whenever afterwards you think your incremental backup would normally be finished.)

 

 

 

 

[oli]

Retrospect Workgroup and Retrospect Server should be capable to properly do backups of a Mac OS X Server while all services are running. This is the main difference to the Express and Desktop versions, as I understood from the specifications. It may happen that you get backup errors when users are accessing files while the backup is running, but that is normal (mostly the backuped version of the file will be different from the current version during comparision).

 

 

 

However, you'll need to shutdown databases (MySQL, FileMaker, PrimeBase etc.) to properly backup their data. You'll need to either copy their data to a different location using shell scripts and cron jobs, and then do a Retrospect backup of the copied database files, or you can try to shutdown/restart these databases using the AppleScript Retrospect-Event-Handler.

 

 

 

Note: I've not yet been able to implement something to have the Adobe Web Workgroup Server (which is based on Tomcat/PrimeBase) start after the backup has finished....