Availability of Services During Backups

Backing up a Security Management appliance copies the active data set from the ‘source’ Security Management appliance to a ‘target’ Security Management appliance with minimum disruption on the originating ‘source’ appliance.

The phases of the backup process and their effect on the availability of services are as follows:

• Phase 1—Phase 1 of the backup process starts with the data transfer between the source and target appliances. During data transfer, services on the source appliance remain running, therefore data collection can still continue. However, services are shut down on the target appliance. Once the data transfer is complete from the source to target appliance, Phase 2 begins.
• Phase 2—When Phase 2 begins, services on the source appliance are shut down. Any differences that have collected during the data transfer between the source and target appliance since the initial shutdown are copied to the target appliance and services on both the source and the target appliances are returned to the state they were in when backup was initiated. This allows maintain maximum uptime on the source appliance and no data loss for either appliance.

During the backup, data availability reports may not work, and when viewing the message tracking results, the hostname for each message may be labeled as ‘unresolved’.

If you try to schedule a report and forget that a backup is in progress, you can check the system status by choosing Management Appliance > Centralized Services. From this window you can see the warning at the top of the page that a system backup is in progress.