Backing up and recovering the application serving environment
The product uses many operating system and application resources that you should consider adding to your backup and recovery procedures.
About this task
WebSphere Application Server resources can be saved while the product environment is active. When backing up database data, you may have to shut down some or all services if a snapshot cannot be obtained. This would occur if there are requests which obtain locks or have open transactions against the database being saved. In a distributed environment, you may need to consider how to get a consistent backup across several systems. If the data on systems is not closely related to data on other systems, you may be able to backup each system in isolation. If we need a snapshot across systems simultaneously, you may need to stop activity on all systems while the snapshot is taken.
How often you back up resources depends largely on when or how often you expect them to change.
Procedure
- Back up your product environment configuration.
This category covers the resources that define your WebSphere Application Server operating environment. Once you have done initial setup, this information should change very infrequently. You might backup this information only when you change these settings, and not include these resources in regularly scheduled backups.
- Administrative configuration files
- HTTP configuration (see the documentation for your Web server)
- Back up your applications.
This category covers the applications you run using WebSphere Application Server. You should back these up the same way you back up other applications on your system. You could backup these resources every time you add or change an application, or include these resources in a regularly scheduled backup.
- Back up your application data.
This category covers the data stores used by your WAS applications. Unless your applications serve only static information, these resources are usually quite dynamic. You should back these up the same way you back up other business data on your system. These resources are suited for inclusion in a regularly scheduled backup.
What to do next
If your applications are using other resources or services that are external to the product, remember to include those in your backup plan as well.
Related tasks
Restarting an application server in recovery mode Configuring transaction properties for peer recovery