How growing Vault is managed for backup activity at your site

[sshankaracharya]

Hello Windchillers,

I would like to know how the growing vault is managed for the backup activity at your site.

With us when we draw a graph of vault Growth vs Days, the graph is going up, if we imagine this for a year, we will have a lot of problem in backup process as the backup process runs for days hampering server performance.

Is Vault at your site is split into different drives?. So as to manage backup plan for each drive at different intervals?

Thanks,

Shashi

[BineshKumar1]

Hello Shashi,

It mostly depends on what sort of storage mechanism you are using for vault - SAN/NAS. If you are using any of NetApp/EMC technologies, then you can probably try snapshot of volumes. It also offers mirroring to remote sites for disaster recovery.

If you are relying on scripting methods for the backup of vaults, then you have to just do the differential copy of the latest writable vault folder for each of the vaults. Windchill will not make any changes in the folders which are marked as read-only so you don't have to take backup of those folders leaving only a couple of folders to be scanned for changes. If you combine fire a few sqls from the script which you use for backup, you can easily get the folders which were writable between now and the last backup,  If you are looking to save space you can use variety of vaulting strategies, you can see some point here - Re: Windchillers,  Can you suggest the best practice to backup vaults (Around 2TB in size) ? What are the best practises you are using to backup the vaults ?  Different drives of course helps in  performance but might not help from a backup perspective.

A lot of commercials backup solutions are quicker than using xcopy or robocopy - like veeam.  Again the solution depends on your infrastructure technology and the level of RTO/RPO commitments which you have towards the business.

Hope it helps

Thank you

Binesh Kumar

Barry Wehmiller

[sshankaracharya]

Hi Binesh,

Thank you for your feedback, i should get to know what backup infrastructure we use with IT here.

I executed Windu to Listunreferencedfiles from all vaults (master and sites) got surprised to see diskspace consumption by these unreferenced files.

Thanks,

Shashi

[ChrisPLM]

HI

in addition to what Binesh has said. I would strongly recommend to regularly removed unreferenced documents.

When we learnt about this functionality our vaults size was reduced by an astonished factor of 2.3..

Since then with an upgrade to 10.1, this functionality is ran automatically every day.

Best regards

[sshankaracharya]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your feedaback Chris. When you say you are running this automatically everyday, that means, you have configured the removeunreferenced files functionality right?

Thanks,

Shashi

[ChrisPLM]

yes (but not me personally), I am just the dum manager

[BineshKumar1]

Hello Shashi,

You don't have to run it every day. Running it once a month, like what PTC recommends in http://support.ptc.com/WCMS/files/123340/en/WindchillSystemMonitoringMaintenanceBestPractices.pdf is a good start. It is a good idea to do it right after your vault backup, so it would be easy to restore if something goes wrong.

Thank you

Binesh Kumar