Backing up Lotus Domino with Tar and Rsync

A couple of months ago we upgraded our Lotus Domino server to the latest code from IBM. We're running Domino 8 on Linux. We’ve been running on Red Hat Linux for nearly four years now and it’s been a good move. We’ve even survived hardware failure twice in the last three years thanks to good backups. We began with Red Hat 2.1 Enterprise and now we’ve moved to Red Hat Enterprise 5. The in-place upgrade of the OS took a little over an hour and the upgrade of the Domino code was accomplished in much less time than that. We used a DVD of Red Hat 5 that came from and ISO downloaded from Red Hat

For the last couple of years I’d been backing up the server using a script that downed the server while the Notes Data directory was backed up with “tar� and then “gzipped.� The tar.gz file was then copied to another directory on the server and then using another script was “rsynced� to another Linux server. We had been keeping day stamped backup files and they were taking up space on that server. This year, following the upgrade, I wanted to change that and following some research I’ve been able to do just that. On Monday-Friday each week our Domino Server is shutdown for about a half hour while the Notes data directory is backed up. I’ve also changed the script so that the date is appended to each tar file. This tar.gz file is then copied to a backup directory and then after rsync has safely moved it to another Linux server, it is deleted. This move has reclaimed nearly 45 gigabytes of disk space on our Domino server.

My backup server is a Ubuntu 7.04 server which also functions as our intranet web server and it’s got plenty of disk space. I’ve decided that I wanted to keep two weeks of backups and so I’m using yet another script which has been added to cron.daily. This script uses the “find� “mtime�, “exec� and “rm� to remove files older than 14 days. This has been a good solution and one that just works. It’s one of the reasons I love Linux and open source.

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