User Guide Part 2

26 7signal solution 140
7signal Solutions, Inc., 526 S. Main Street, Akron, Ohio 44311, USA, 855-763-9526, [e-mail], www.7signal.com
7signal Sapphire Carat User Guide Release 5.0
Offline backups are possible but require user actions both to shutdown 7signal Sapphire and
do the actual backup.
Handicaps of the default method:
- no precise and secure backup (system state) to return to by default
- backup process is completely manual
- backup process requires downtime
Method strengths:
- least planning
- least resource consuming
First degree of backup: offline backup
Most importantly this method gives fully recoverable snapshots at the desired intervals. The
disk space requirement is an issue but not extremely serious as the frequency is totally user-
managed and the file size growth is easy to check (with the tools provided by the operating
system, not by 7signal). The downside is the downtime as the 7signal Sapphire must be halted
for the time of the backup, hence it is called offline backup. Typically this would be rather
minutes than tens of minutes. Naturally all the measurements are stopped for that time.
Offline backup 1st degree is available in every install and run scenario of 7signal Sapphire. One
can start offline backup with a tool or have it run by the system in a circadian manner.
Method handicaps:
- backup process requires downtime
Method strengths:
- simple to recover
- recovered system state is thoroughly consistent
TIP: offline backup is suitable for environments that require automated backup
but do have neither special backup policy hardware nor other extensive
resources.
2nd degree of backup: online backup
The requirement for the online backup is that infinite archive logging is enabled.
When online backup is operational, the most significant benefit is the ability to run circadian
backups online i.e. 7signal Sapphire remains operational and continues testing while creating
the backup. As opposed to offline backup, the system is online all the time producing
measurements.
The first and the most important assumption is that there is a storage device available that in
practice is a so-called endless device. 7signal cannot and shall not guarantee any checks on the
device but it is assumed to be available all the time and have the capacity for massive data
transfers. The user is responsible for the storage capacity.
NOTE: backups are not done incrementally in any case. This means that over time
the needed to dump the database increases but more importantly the disk space
requirement increases continuously.