Index Hot backup

[oznevo]

Hi,

According to our business needs we need to schedule the index hot backup to run few times a day (and not necessarily at 3:00 AM every day).

We are manipulating the default cron expression schedule (0 0 3 * * ?).

My questions:
1. As we saw, there is no indication (in the log) when this job starts and ends. If so - how can we tell?
We want to tape the backup after it is done
2. What is the overhead we are paying for this hot backup? Do you have numbers?
3. If we schedule the hot backup to run every one hour and within this period the backup didn’t complete - what will happen? will it start again and overwrite the existing? Can we define rules here (e.g. backup to a different location)?

B.T.W - we use 2.1

Thanks

[pmonks]

Regarding #1, there is currently no out-of-the-box way to monitor Alfresco background tasks - this is currently logged in JIRA as enhancement request ALFCOM-891 (http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/ALFCOM-891 - I'd encourage you to vote and/or comment on this issue if you feel it's important).  That said, background tasks in Alfresco are managed by the Quartz library (http://www.opensymphony.com/quartz/) and Quartz provides some capabilities for monitoring what's going on - you could develop functionality (perhaps a Web Script) that exposes these capabilities in a user visible and/or scriptable way.

Regarding #2, I'm not entirely sure which part of the hot backup you're concerned about, but I don't believe Alfresco's index backup process excessively taxes the system while it's running (although I might be wrong - I'd want to test it myself before making any assumptions).  The performance impact of your own hot backup process (the scripts that backup the database, content store and backup indexes) is most dependent on how you're backing up the database - see http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Backup_and_Restore for the requirements for the database backup portion of the overall hot backup process.

Regarding #3, I believe the Quartz jobs are configured to avoid concurrent execution, but you should check the scheduled tasks configuration file to be sure.

Cheers,
Peter