Lotus Domino Backup with Veeam Backup & Replication

Hi everybody,

on customer request I created a video that shows backup and single mail restore for lotus domino with Veeam Backup & Replication.

A Lotus Domino is non VSS aware (anyway this is the case under Linux).  So you have only 2 options for consistent backups as IBM do not support VSS Filesystem only backups:

  1.  Shutdown the VM => Service offline or at cluster do this only on one side.
  2. Close the connections and write the cache to disk

The question is why should I use a non Domino Backup API based backup?

For Veeam the answer is:

  • Ultra Fast Serivce Restore with Instant VM Recovery (2min + OS boot)
  •  Easy to use Single Mail/Document restore
  • Automated Restore Tests with SureBackup that test if a VM is Restoreable, OS boot, Network Connection is online and Domino Services are up and running on a daily base.
  • And finally a backup on Image Level with Change Block Tracking based Incremental Forever is very efficient even at a Domino Server with high change rate.

Enjoy the video

https://www.veeam.com/videos/backing-up-non-vss-aware-applications-ibm-lotus-domino-4867.html

3 thoughts on “Lotus Domino Backup with Veeam Backup & Replication”

  1. Hi, nice video, but it doesn’t cover a situation when nsf is DAOS-enabled. In short, these databases have attachments stored outside of nsf and therefore the restore process has to include these files as well. But it is not possible to find out which files belong to restored nsf.. If I’m not wrong, Domino API aware backup solution has to be used to easily solve such tasks.

    1. Correct, most likely when you copy a mail back from backup to production it will link automatically again to the production DAOS database. If the attachement is still there (because it is linked at other mailbox dbs) you are fine. Otherwise you have to boot the backed up Domino Server to the Veeam lab and use Veeam Universal Recovery wizard to extract the mail with attachement. Not nice but works.

      In general you should use a domino API aware backup system that can handle (logfile based) point in time restores for your non mail DBs. Veeam can help in 2 ways on top of an API based backup. Veeam can provide very fast disaster recovery when the whole server is gone (Services are back in 2 min + boot time of the domino server with Instant VM Recovery) and as well you can very easily copy mails back from backup in most cases less than 2 min as well.

    2. Yes, it is possible to find out which files belong to the restored nsf. But only in a second step after you copied the restored the nsf into the Domino data. Use the “tell daosmgr listnlo” command:
      https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/Archiving_and_recovering_IBM_Lotus_DAOS-enabled_databases

      You can configure the “prune interval” to keep these attachments for x days so that you won’t need this second step as long as your backup is from within this time range.

      A Domino API aware backup doesn’t resolve this automatically. For example IBM’s own Tivoli Storage Manager also needs this second step.

      I’d highly recommend using DAOS because it probably minimizes the daily file change rate dramatically.

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