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 ?

Linux is very good with handling hundreds of thousands of files in folders - that is a good choice.

For backup I suggest using rsync to do a mirror copy of the vaults.  If you do not have a backup yet, ideally start the initial backup over the weekend, then use a daily rsync copy to keep the vault copy up to date.  This will let you just copy the changes, rather than having to copy the whole vault over.

You need to define a strategy for vaulting from an application perspective.

1. Start the practice of creating separate rootfolders for every large bucket of data (say1 TB of data)
2. Upon reaching 1TB, mark the current root folder(rootfolder1) as readonly and create a new rootfolder(rootfolder2).
3. Since windchill is not going to t write any contents to read only folders, you don't need to perform a daily backup of rootfolder1.
4. Differential backup and tape offloading could be done using standard backup tools from Backup Exec/Avamar(its cool). On a very basic level,you can write multiple rootfolder specific rsync jobs and schedule it in cron.

Multiple vault strategy could be used as well but I would recommend a multiple root folder setup than a multiple vault setup because of the overhead of vaulting rule validation unless your business demands data isolation. In one of our implementations we have a multiple vault setup, specifically because we have archived products(not used) isolated to separate vaults and is stored in basic drives(less expensive) and active products are in vaults stored in moderate to high speed drives.

Thanks

Binesh

Barry Wehmiller