Hello, we are in the process of bringing our 10.1 environment up and have a couple of questions in regards to best backup procedures. We are a smaller company and are new to epicor. We have one physical server that hosts SQL and is also the appserver. We currently are backing up our databases via a maintenance plan in SSMS.
What backup software is recommended for complete disaster recovery?
What areas on the epicor server should be backed up other than the databases? i.e. any epicor sub-folders, log files etc.?
For your production database you should have this set to full recovery mode.
You should look at configuring transaction log backups every 30 minutes if you are happy to lose that much data reduce time as needed.
Transaction log backups should be moved to a seperate location.
With regards to what to backup you should look at a configuration type backup which is a full server backup. Then complement that with you data backup and transaction logs.
Remember to rotate the backups and maintain end of month etc.
There are many good solutions out there for backups but the above can be done with what you already have.
Also if you are interested take a look at some of the azure site recovery elements.https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/site-recovery/
Along with solutions such as Veeam.
Finally before you go live perform a rehearsal. I had a site only last week taken down by 0Day encrypting malware. Their backup procedures saved the business. Infected on the Friday afternoon back online before the users noticed Monday.
@Edge has given you some great info for backups, I will elaborate on the physical (hardware) backups.
I have a GHOST (Symantec) image backup of my physical server which I update periodically.
I also have vRanger (Dell) for our backups which does complete backups of both physical and virtual servers.
@Edge mentioned Veeam which I think also does the same thing as vRanger. There are others as well.
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Does anyone have recommendations on how long to keep the full backup files of our LIVE database? We currently have a full backup of our LIVE DB occurring every night, we are also backing up our transaction log every 30 minutes.
Also is it necessary to backup the Reports database?
Where I use to work and for several of my customer’s I have found this to be a common practice:
3 to 7 days of nightly backups - very often I have seen the backups named MondayBAckup.Bak , Tuesday…… etc so they get overwritten every week.
I would also recommend having backups uploaded to some offsite location or Datacenter.
I also kept a backup of Every Month-end / Typically run on the first of the month early morning / Could be the Nightly Backup timing wise.
I kept all month end backups for archive purposes / My controller actually asked for various monthend backups to be restored to a Monthend DB environment we had available for the accounting folks – usually this evironment was just the prior monthend … But there were a few instances where they needed to validate some data in prior months and make sure not changes had occurred and we would restore that particular monthend for him.
I do not see how useful from a business and protection function that keeping more than a weeks worth of backups could be.
Yet once in awhile when an anomaly happened in the system or db I might keep a few backups before and after that period in case we or epicor needed to review data corruption or the like…
Anyway that is my two cents worth…. Also there Is no reason whatsoever to keep a backup of the reporting db… that db can be regenerated blank if needed.
There is no real savings grace with backup up the reports db - as a matter of fact I am working with a customer to clear that db out periodically because they had a lot of old report data that is of no use that was not cleared out by epicor. Or someone set to hold forever.
That really is a temp database to hold the data for the reports as they run and to hold data for a developer to use if making changes to an SSRS report. If you lost that db and created an empty one. All you have to do is reprint the report in epicor to create the reporting db…
