In this video we are going to learn how to
perform an on demand backup of your PI Data
Archive. Recall from the previous video that a backup is a copy
of anything that makes your PI Data Archive unique.
This includes both
configuration files as well as your archives which will hold your
historical data. In general,
you should have an automatically executed backup in the
form of a scheduled task as part of your day to day backup plan.
However, we understand that there might be times
outside of your regularly scheduled backups that you
want to take a backup of your PI Data Archive. Some examples
of when it's a good idea to take an on demand backup,
include when you are going to migrate your PI Data Archive
to a new machine, when you are about to make a big configuration
change or when you want to save a
backup of your PI Data Archive to a location other than
that of your regularly scheduled backups.
So now let's take a look at how to perform an
on demand backup through the backup plugin
in PI System Management Tools.
While on my PI Data Archive machine, I'm going to open up
PI System Management Tools by going to Start,
All Programs, PI System, PI System Management Tools.
Once PI System Management Tools is
open, I want to make sure I'm connected to the correct PI Data Archive.
Then I'm going to navigate to
Operation,
Backups. In this plugin, you can see a
history of all backups that have been performed for your PI Data Archive.
Additionally, this is the location where we can perform an
on demand backup. In order to perform an
on demand backup, I'm going to go to the top and
select the Backup Now icon.
The Backup Now icon opens a
window where you can see all files that you can
include in the backup of your PI Data Archive.
Note that the files are sorted by the PI Data Archive
subsystem that they are associated with.
Additionally, you can see a list of all of your archive files.
Here you can also see various pieces
of information about the files such as the
size, the date it was last backed up, or the date
it was last modified. By default, all files are
selected. However if I do not want to include
all pieces of configuration information or all of
my archives in my on demand backup, then I can
deselect the corresponding subsystem
for a particular archive file that I would like to exclude.
For instance, if I only want to include my
primary archive in my backup, I can
deselect all other archives.
I can tell that this is my primary archive
because it has an end time of current and it's
named archive 0.
Once you have decided which files you'd like to include in your on
demand backup, you need to specify a location for your backup.
Again this should be a different
directory than that of your regularly scheduled backups.
In my case, I have a G drive
specific to my PI Backups and here I'm going to place
it in the folder for my on demand backup.
After you set the location of your backup, you can
select the backup icon.
You can then use the status bar at the bottom
of the page
to inform you on the progress of your currently running
PI Data Archive on demand backup.
Once the backup is complete, it will also
appear in your backup history.
One thing to note is all backups performed within
this plugin are considered to be type copy.
This means that it does not update the
last backup attribute for each file.
To confirm this,
we can navigate to our operation archives tab within PI System Management Tools.
Here,
if I look at the primary archive that we included
in the PI Data Archive backup that we just
performed, I can see that it does not have
a time for last backup set.
Again, this is because all backups
performed through the SMT plugin are considered to be type copy.
It is only with full or incremental backups
that the last modified time will be
updated. We will learn how to perform both
full or baseline backups in the next video, as well as how to setup our automated
backups. Overall,
we learned how to take an on demand backup of our PI Data
Archive through the backup plugin to PI System Management Tools.
If I navigate to the directory
that I specified for my on demand backup,
which is my case is G,
On Demand, I can see that it not only backed up all of my
configuration files for my PI Data Archive, but it also backed up
the primary archive that I specified, as well as
its associated annotation file.
Please feel free to continue watching to learn how to setup automated
backups of your PI Data Archive.