Now that we have learned how to perform various types of
PI Data Archive backups as well as configure
a scheduled task for our automated daily backup. We want to know how to
check our backup history and validate that our backups are successful.
Without verifying that your backups
are being taken properly, you may find yourself unprotected if your
backups were encountering errors and thus not executing properly.
The easiest way to monitor your PI
Data Archive backups is to use the backup plug-in to PI System Management Tools.
This will allow my PI
Data Archive machine, I'm going to navigate to my
Start, All Programs, PI System and open
PI System Management Tools.
Within PI System Management Tools,
I'm going to go to
Operation and the Backups plug-in. Here you can see a
history of all of the backups that have been performed for your
PI Data Archive. Additionally, you can see
if the backup was executed successfully.
Going through the list of my
backups, we can see that there were the on demand backups that I
performed in the first video through
the PI System Management plug-in that we are in right now.
Then we
perform our full backups which were our baseline backup
for our PI Data Archive which we did before we configured our automated
daily task. Finally, we have
our incremental backups which have copied only files
that were changed since the previous backup. And these were
performed as part of the scheduled task that we setup.
So for instance, you can see that this backup ran at
3:15 in the morning which is the default for the automated
backup task. Finally,
I can easily see that one of my backups did not complete
successfully along with the error code associated with the
reason that it failed.
So for instance, my most recent incremental backup
performed through my scheduled task, did not complete successfully
because I ran out of disk space on my PI
Data Archive backup drive. For more information about a particular
backup, you can double click on the entry itself within the PI
System Management Tools backup plug-in.
Here you can see a summary of data about that particular backup.
As well as a list of all of the files that were backed up
in that particular backup.
With regards to your archive files,
if you check the PI System Management Tools
archives plug-in, you can quickly see the last time that your archive files
were included in a backup. For instance, my
primary archive which is currently being written
into was included in a more recent backup
than my older archives as it has been modified more recently.
For more information about particular
backups, you can also check the log that is generated within the backup
itself for each automated daily backup.
Thus if I navigate to the
backup directory which in my
case is my G, PI Backups, Automated.
I can see the log files that were generated for each automated backup that
was run. Additionally I can see that the backup
that failed has an error in the name
of the log as well. Looking at a healthy
backup, I can see information such as the registered
archives during the time of the backup, as well as
details on which files were included in that backup.
If I go to the very bottom of the log, I should hopefully
see that my PI backup was completed successfully.
Now if we take a look
at my incremental backup that encountered an
error, I see the same information, however I also
see that there were errors encountered.
Go into the bottom of the field, I get more details on the
errors that were encountered. So in this case,
I see that there was insufficient disk space for my backup,
and thus my PI backup did not complete successfully.
When backups fail, messages are also written to your
PI Data Archive message logs. Therefore if I
navigate back to PI System Management Tools,
under operation, message logs,
I can find the particular logs that I'm looking
for. So for instance, if I change my time range to the past
hour, I get all of the
message logs from my PI Data Archive. However, I
can also specify that I want it to be particular
to the PI backup program which will
help filter my logs to be more specific.
Here I can see
more information about the errors that were
encountered during my particular backup. For instance, the
most recent incremental backup that I ran,
failed due to low disk space.
It is recommended that you periodically make sure your backups are
executing properly so that you don't trap yourself in a
situation where you do not have a success PI Data Archive
that you can use to restore your system if necessary.