It is advisable to back up your service integration system on a
regular basis so that you can restore it in the event of an unrecoverable
failure. Learn about the issues when taking backups and restoring from a backup.
For service integration, these are the main sections of the system that
you can back up:
- The configuration files for the system.
- The configuration of the system is stored as XML files. To back up or
restore these configuration files, use the relevant command as detailed in Backing up and restoring administrative configurations.
Any backup or restore of a service integration environment must include a
backup or restore of the configuration files.
- The data stores that are accessed by the messaging engines.
- Taking or restoring a backup of your data stores is optional. Messages
are transient in nature, so you might not want to back up or restore the data
stores.
- If you do not take a backup of the data stores, and you have modified
your current configuration since it was last backed up, and you then restore
the configuration backup, be aware that you may lose messages. For example,
if you back up the configuration and then create a bus destination, when you
restore the configuration backup the destination will no longer exist. Any
messages for this destination will be deleted when the server that hosted
that messaging engine is restarted.
- If you do take a backup of your data stores, you must also take a backup
of the configuration files. You must take the configuration backup at the
same time, and restore it at the same time, as the data store backups; taking
the backup and restoring at the same time maintains the consistency of the
system and reduce the possibility of loss of messages, or duplication of messages
from the time of the backup.
To back up a data store, see Backing up a data store.
- The file stores that are accessed by the messaging engines.
- Taking or restoring a backup of your file stores is optional. Messages
are transient in nature, so you might not want to back up or restore the files.
To back up a file store, see Backing up a file store.
If your environment includes multiple servers, you should backup all the
servers at the same time, otherwise messages from the time of the backup might
be lost or duplicated. You should also minimize the amount of message traffic
flowing through the system to reduce the possibility of lost or duplicate
messages.
When you restart a messaging engine after restoring a backup, you should
take steps to minimize loss of messages. See Restoring a data store and recovering its messaging engine.