Lotus Notes Point in time restore crashes Notes

[vm146971]

NBU 5.1 MP1 W2k sp4, Master server, Lotus domino 6.5.3, running on W2k sp4 with 5.1 NBU client:

The Lotus server resides in a single policy, the backup selections includes the absolute path to the Notes Mail files and the directive "Backup_Transaction_logs". The Poilcy has 2 schedules, Full and Differential incremental. For the restore only the last full backup image is selected (none of the subsequent incremental images are selected), Assign New Database ID and a point in time that is before the last incremental backup ran is selected . Notes database compaction is shut off to ensure that DBIID does not change between the full and the incremental backups. We also shut off virus scanning to take that out of the picture as well.

During a point in time restore the Lotus Domino server crashes.

A restore from the last full backup, without applying the transaction log always works.

Any suggestions on how to make this work are welcome.

 

[vm146971]

I did get a reply from Lotus/IBM on this, below are thier comments:
The cause of the crash was the mail router accessing
the database while the roll back was in process. This will always cause
an issue. All roll backs should be done on a seperate test server or on
a server with the tasks disabled as the tasks hitting a DB that is being
rolled back with get an access violation error.


Veritas suggested the following procedure for running a point in time restore:

step 1 Shut down the lotus mail router.
step 2 Select the last Full backup image from the NBU Archive and Restore utility

step 3 select change database id
step 4 select a point in time that less than or equal to the time stamp on the last transaction log backup

Now comes the ugly part:
Now that the file has been restored and it has a new DBIID you will not be able to recover the mail file beyond the point of the restore, unless you run a full backup of the restored mail file:
step 5 run a full backup of the the restored mail file.

 

[lenski]

That information is pants, You should not have to do any of the fiddling. But I'm having my own issues with NB 5 and Lotus notes at the moment.

I'm not sure that I can help much as we are Notes on Solaris. But we would never worry about the steps Veritas have listed. The date for the PiT can be any time/date after the full backup, the trans logs can be any mix of backed up or not. The recovery of the trans logs should be automatic and not require your selection or supervison.

But and this is a big one the process of recovery is not managed and monitored well by NB. The restore may seem to be complete but the roll forward can take days if there are a large number of trans logs to process. Any touching of the restored file in that time can screw the domino server.