Running the Backup server task

Back up databases by scheduling the Backup server task to run through a Program document. You can also run Backup at the Domino console using the load backup command.

Procedure

The Backup task supports the following arguments.
Argument Description
-b Backs up databases and templates only. Doing once a day is recommended regardless of transaction log mode.
-t (For archived-style transaction logging only) Backs up transaction log (TXN) files. Depending on your server size and volume of changed data, back up these files every 2 to 8 hours.
-i (For archived-style transaction logging only) To ensure point-in-time recovery, performs incremental backups of new databases or databases that have been assigned new database instance IDs (DBIIDs) since the last full backup. Running backup with this option every 2 to 4 hours is recommended. Operations like Fixup and Compact assign new DBIIDs to databases, causing the new IDs to be used in transaction logs. By doing incremental backups of databases that have new DBIIDs, the new DBIIDs are referenced in the backup and match the new IDs in the transaction logs used for point-in-time recovery.
-s Runs snapshot backup as configured in the Snapshot tab of the backup Configuration document.
-e

By default, excluded databases are determined by the Excluded databases field in the Main tab of a backup configuration. In some cases, it makes sense to exclude different databases for different backups in a week. This option allows you to exclude databases through regular expressions similar to the backup configuration. The only difference is that it automatically appends an * to match the end of the string for your convenience.

-e can be used multiple times to define multiple exclusion patterns.

By default, -e adds database exclusion patterns to any that exist in the backup configuration. Use -e with -E to instead replace the patterns in the configuration with new patterns.

-E Ignores the Excluded databases field in the Main tab of backup configuration documents. Can be used in conjunction with -e to replace the excluded databases pattern in the configuration with a different excluded databases pattern. For example: -E -e archiv/.
-p <number of days> Prunes (deletes) restored databases that have been marked as expired for a specified number of days. You can specify the number of days in the command. If you do not, the number of days specified for the Backup retention (days) setting is used. Restored databases are marked as expired according to the "Default restore retention days" configuration setting.
Note: This command does not perform database backup.
Tip: You can also select specific databases to prune. From a Logs view of the Domino Backup database, select the databases to prune and then click Mark Backup for Prune. To prune the databases, click Run Prune Server Cmd or run the command load backup -p.
-v

Enables verbose logging to the console. This generates a lot of extra logging and is intended only for troubleshooting.

-V

Enables verbose and debug logging for troubleshooting. Logs are written into console.log. Standard log messages are written into log.nsf