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kaushalsolanki
Quartz | Level 8

Hello All,

 

We want to have a full environment backup for our SAS Environment which includes below products.

 

  • Base SAS
  • Platform Suite for SAS
  • Quality Knowledge Base Locale, English India
  • SAS Contextual Analysis
  • SAS Data Management Contextual Extraction Language Pack for English
  • SAS Data Quality Server
  • SAS Data Quality Standard
  • SAS Integration Technologies
  • SAS Metadata Server
  • SAS Office Analytics
  • SAS Studio
  • SAS/ACCESS Interface to ODBC

 

So Can any one guide me on this topic, thanks in advance.

 

Regards,

Kaushal Solanki

11 REPLIES 11
SASKiwi
PROC Star

Backing up your SAS server environment is best done with server backup tools like Comvault.

 

The best approach is to do a complete server backup of all drives with software installed (eg C and D drives if on Windows) across all of your SAS servers: metadata, compute, mid-tier etc. 

kaushalsolanki
Quartz | Level 8

Hi SASKiwi,

 

Can you please explain your answer in brief?

 

Regards,

Kaushal Solanki

SASKiwi
PROC Star

As @LinusH has explained IT departments use backup tools for making copies of file systems in case there is a storage failure or some other problem that requires files to be restored from backup. You need to talk to your organisation's IT backup people to find out what is available at your site.

 

By taking backups of all of a server's disks you can then ensure that the server can be re-built should a major hardware or software problem happen.

 

A backup of a SAS server does not need to be treated as different to any other type of server.

 

If you have more specific questions, please post them. 

 

 

LinusH
Tourmaline | Level 20
Use any full fledged backup system that operates on your file system. Most organisations have at least one solution or this. Check with your IT department.
The backup should be taken what there are minimal activity (especially when files can be updated).
SAS metadata has its own built in backuparallel. See Management Console documentation for details.
If you have SAS databases it may need special consideration. Your SAS System designer/architect should take part in designing backup routines.
Data never sleeps
kaushalsolanki
Quartz | Level 8

Hi LinusH,

 

We are more concern with our SAS Metadata, Let say my server got crashed and have to install SAS from scratch so The inbuilt backup of SAS Metadata will be usefull to have my SAS Environment back?

 

Regards,

Kaushal Solanki

LinusH
Tourmaline | Level 20

With a proper backup, should never need to reinstall SAS from scratch (unless you have it installed on some old server where there are no spare parts to require).

With metadata backup in place, you still need a file system backup, since the metadata server backup is just "files" in the file system.

I suggest that you read the documentation carefully, and plan the backup strategy with key stakeholders/service personnel.

Data never sleeps
Timmy2383
Lapis Lazuli | Level 10
Technically yes, though you will likely want to make sure you are saving copies of the metadata backups to some kind of alternate or external storage.
anja
SAS Employee

Hi there,

 

what version of SAS are you using? Depending on the version and maintenance release, there are different

options for backing up your environment.

 

Generally speaking, it is very important that, when you use any OS or third party backup tools, you stop the SAS services - Metadata Server!! - to make sure that all data kept in memory are being flushed to disk! Once the Metadata Server is stopped, make sure that the metadata server backup location (default is something like \\Lev1\SASMeta\MetadataServer\Backupxxx) is included in the OS or third party backup. This is the most important thing!!! (see "How Metadata Server Works" for more details: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/bisag/68240/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p1jsr78x5kda05n1fc7p...

 

If you do run os backups without having the Metadata Server stopped, all data that is being stored in memory, will be lost and not recoverable!

 

If you do run SAS 9.4, the following info will be helpful: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/bisag/68240/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p1u29z4y7j3spvn1gaqz...

 

Are you looking for a backup plan solely, meaning, restoring in case something goes wrong, or, are you thinking about failover/high availabilty?

 

Best regards

Anja

JuanS_OCS
Amethyst | Level 16

Hi,

 

I believe you have a SAS 9.4 installation, since you mention SAS Studio between your components installed.

 

Keep in mind what anja mentions, and the link she provides: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/bisag/68240/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p1u29z4y7j3spvn1gaqz...

 

Still,as an alternative and as anja mentioned, if 24/7 service is not a requirement, you can always make a full backup (or snapshot if you are on a virtual server) when all  your SAS services, Platform Computing services and SAS batches are stopped. and nobody has a table locked.

jitendra_pandey
Calcite | Level 5

 

Hello Anja/others,

 

Yes, this documentation exists but the problem is, this backup will not be useful from my perspective if you are unable to bring your SAS Servers up and running due to corrupt config or any other bad installation and configuration related reasons.  You need to have a healthy SAS environment to recover something from the backup mentioned in this SAS documentation.

 

This backup might be more useful when a developer or user deletes some metadata object (table, report etc) by mistake.

 

But there has to be a plan to take the backup at the OS or file system level as other also mentioned in this thread.  I was going to post a new thread but found this one relevant and here is my post.

 

All - Please advise.

 

===============================================================================================

Hello SAS Administrators,

 

If you are a SAS Administrator on Windows Server operating system, I am pretty sure you would have encountered the 200 characters Windows directory path limit problem while taking the backup of SASHome or SASConfig directories (mostly the SASConfig directory on the middle/web tier machine that has light-year-lengthy directory paths that stubbornly deny to get copied) whenever you intended to update, upgrade, hotfix your SAS environment.

 

Another problem you might have encountered is the symbolic links in SASHome directory, if you copy and paste them, they become an actual Windows directory with the same name.  You have to use maklink.exe to recreate the symbolic links.

 

So, if you intend to take the backup of SASHome and SASConfig directories by copying and pasting them to some location, this does not work.

 

My organization uses Tivoli Storage Manager to take "incremental" backup of the servers, but let me tell you this did not help me when I had to recover SASHome and SASConfig from this backup once.

 

I might have taken the “clone” of *.vmdk or *.vhd file if I had a Virtualized SAS Environment, but fortunately/unfortunately I have been dealing with physical machines.

 

So, my question to you all is, do we have any better backup strategy for the backup of overall SAS installation that is sitting on a physical server/machine? Or migrating to a virtualized environment is the only way to go?

 

Thanks and regards,

Jitendra Pandey

Thanks and regards,
Jitendra Pandey
JuanS_OCS
Amethyst | Level 16

Hi,

 

I am not sure yet which version of SAS you have there.I also don't know if you really require a 24/7 SAS service or you can allow yourself some downtime. And I don't know how. Muchrhe size of the data you need to backup.

 

In any case, I understand you are dealing with physical servers, therefore no VM snapshots there.

 

It is also very important if you can understand, that SAS is no different to other systems, backup wise.

 

What you need to ensure is, each time you have a backup, is a consistent one. Eg, you cannot backup a file that is currently in use, or you should not do a backup in the middle of an ETL process. Therefore you need either a time window to backup and/or plan a very good sync process, which is a great option, specially on volume clusters, RAID, etc

 

And of course a simple copy might not be a good idea, specially under Windows, but the you have great tools as Robocopy and others. I feel confident your company already uses a great tool and processes for backups.

 

 

 

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