What's needed for backups before upgrading from SAS 9.4M5 to SAS 9.4M6?

[MarkESmith]

Hey all,

I was hoping to get some input on what kind of backups I should have on hand before executing the process to upgrade from SAS 9.4M5 to SAS 9.4M6.

We currently do weekly backups with the SAS Backup Manager - the sources for this backup are the Metadata Server, the Content Server, Config Directories, and Database. It may worthwhile to note that these backups are stored on the local machine that SAS is running on (Red Hat EL 7),

Besides these, we have a third party tool that does nightly incremental backups of the entire SAS host.

Is this adequate for a contingency in case something goes wrong with the upgrade process from SAS 9.4M5 to SAS 9.4M6? What's truly needed here?

[Kurt_Bremser]

Make sure that you have a system backup made after all SAS services are stopped, then do the upgrade.

[MarkESmith]

By "system backup", are you referring to the third party tool, the SAS
Backup Manager, or both?

[Kurt_Bremser]

The third party tool. It allows you to recreate the state of the whole server, if TSHTF.

[AnandVyas]

As already advised by @Kurt_Bremser Its better to have cold backups of your home and config directories when no SAS Services/Process is running. I won't rely much on the SAS Backup Manager backups.

[kdebruhl]

We do daily SAS Backup and Recovery Utility backups.
Operating system level backups (incremental)

BUT, before we do an upgrade, as others have suggested, I do a basic "cold, no SAS services" tarZ backup of SASHome and the Config directory.  The idea, that like others said, TSHTF, I can simply untar and resume from that point.

YMMV

[MarkESmith]

Thanks for the input! Are the SASHome and the Config directory structures
the only two mission critical directory structures that I'll need a backup
of (essentially meaning, they'll be the only two affected by a partial
upgrade/failed upgrade and will be the ones that need to be restored from
a backup)?

[AnandVyas]

It depends on how your current architecture is. Do you have any SAS components configured as HA and are sitting on shared file-system? (Ex: Metadata backups, Mid-Tier components)

If not, those two directories should suffice.

[MarkESmith]

Nothing set up for HA. Our SAS deployment is on a single machine and is
not clustered.

Our main component is SAS Visual Analytics - anyone know off the top of
their head where all the configuration for VA sits (plus all the custom
stuff - user created data-prep queries, etc.)?

[AnandVyas]

Configuration should be all under SAS-Config/Lev1 and if data is being stored under PublicDataProvider Library it resides under AppData directory under SAS-Config/Lev1 by default configuration so I think it should cover the most.

For user created stuff I don't think upgrade is going to impact that.