Frequent vault backups are critical to safeguarding the valuable documents residing in Meridian vaults. You should make backups at least daily, even if you have implemented Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) or other data redundancy systems. Vault backups allow you to recover from failures that are not disk-related, such as human or software errors. Even though you will lose all documents and metadata created after the last backup and the vault recovery process can be quite time-consuming, restoring a backup is in most cases the last resort and it enables you to recover from virtually all emergency cases. We highly recommend that you also implement procedures to maintain additional periodic backups using retention schemes such as monthly/weekly/daily.
You use the Meridian Enterprise Administrator wizards to create and restore vault backups. The Prepare for Backup Wizard prepares backup files for a vault, which can then be backed up to a safe location by your normal backup software. The Restart After Restore From Backup Wizard restores a vault from files created by the Prepare for Backup Wizard.
You must use the Meridian wizards or their command-line equivalents to make and restore vault backups. Simply backing up and restoring the Meridian vault folders is insufficient and can result in lost data. Likewise, backing up and restoring SQL Server or Oracle vault databases with those system's tools is insufficient for two reasons. The first reason is that only the Meridian tools will ensure that all pending transactions are committed to the vault database before a backup is made and no data is lost. The second reason is that most third-party backup programs do not back up files that are in use, and a vault's database files are in use whenever the EDM Server service is running.
Meridian tracks the amount of time elapsed since a vault was last prepared for backup. When you open the Meridian Enterprise Administrator tool, a warning message is shown if any vaults have not been prepared for backup in over five days. This interval may be adjusted with the AlertNoBackup registry key described in Windows Registry Keys. The Status column in the EDM Server vault list in the Administrator also shows the backup status of vaults.
Regardless of the database engine used by a vault, the data backup and recovery procedures are similar and are described in the following topics. If the SQL Server or Oracle database engines are used, the procedures are slightly different.
