I know that there are some other discussions on this same topic, but I had a few questions for which I could not find answers.
Our Windchill vault is around 1.7 TB in size with master and 9 replica servers scattered around the globe.
Our backup procedure is as follows for the master server.
- Full backup of the server once a month which includes all files systems and the vaults.
- a partial backup of the masteruploadfolder (cache vault) and mastervault every Friday (which is around 900 GB)
- Daily Differential backup (which is around 1-10 GB)
Since the partial backup is around 900GB, it has started choking our network when taking a backup and extends into our regular working hours, causing problems to other business applications.
Once a month we remove the unreferenced files but that does not improve the situation much.
We have set the property wt.fv.fvFileThreshold=50000. So our current mastervault_Folder sequence is 110 and that of the cache vault is 15. All the previous folders from 1 to 109 on master and 1 to 14 on cache vault are set to Read only by Windchill.
I have noticed that even though the the folders are read only, files are being removed from these locations when we run the utility to remove the unreferenced file.
So here are my questions.
- Is it OK to just backup all the folders in the vault once and then just backup the writable folders from the vault every week (cache vault and master vault)? If this is the case we can reduce the backup size from 900 GB to ~100 GB
- If we just backup the writable folders, there will be a lot of unreferenced file in the read only folders that was backed up. Is it OK to just leave it as it is in the backup? Will it create any problems in the future if in case we need to restore the vaults from these backups?
- Other than the mastervault folders and the cache vault folders (the ones that are writable) is there any other locations that needs to be backed up daily?
Hope to hear from the experts out there.