Created by James Hurrell on Jul 19, 2023

Summary: Information about how to backup your Application.

Introduction

A backup plan is essential to be able to recover from a catastrophic event. CAST AIP has many different component parts, mostly likely installed across multiple different hosts. If you are using a virtualized deployment, one effective method for disaster recovery is to implement backups of your virtual machines used by CAST AIP. In addition to this, CAST also provides tools and features that can backup individual items within your overall deployment, such as existing Applications. This section of documentation focuses on these tools and features.

What should be backed up?

If you are not relying on virtual machine backups, then the following are the recommended items that should be backed up in order to be able to restore to a pre-disaster state:

  • Applications, including:
    • All associated schemas - Management, Dashboard and Analysis
    • Delivery folder containing the delivered source code for each version
  • Measurement schema for use by Health Dashboard
  • Persistence databases for AIP Console front-end and AIP Nodes - stores global/application level options and settings

What tools are available?

AIP Console provides various tools to back up the recommended items:

Application

AIP Console has a built-in Application backup feature which will backup the following:

  • the Application's associated schemas in .cssbackup format
  • the Application's Delivery folder in uncompressed format
  • Options set at version level, for example exclusion patterns, source path, objective choices (these are included from AIP Console v. ≥ 1.22) in XML format.

You can perform a backup manually (see Backing up an Application) and also automatically as part of a the process of adding a new version:

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or performing an ad-hoc run analysis/generate snapshot:

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  • The backup (a ZIP file containing .cssbackup) will be stored on the Application's relevant AIP Node, in the following location, therefore you should ensure that these files are also backed up off-node somewhere else in your environment:
%PROGRAMDATA%\AipConsole\AipNode\backup\<application_name>\<appname>_YYYY-MM-DD-HH-mm-SS.zip
Measurement schema

AIP Console has a built in Measurement schema backup which will backup the Measurement schema to .cssbackup format. This tool can only be run manually and is explained in more detail in Administration Center - Settings - Measurement.

Note that when Restoring an Application backup any snapshots that exist in the restored Dashboard schema will be syncrhonized to the Measurement schema automatically.
Persistence databasesAIP Console front-end and each AIP Node use persistence databases to store global/application level options and settings. These databases should be restored if you would like to return to pre-disaster state. See Configuring persistence database backup for more information.