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.
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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
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