Mount external drives for backup

Details

When there is an external storage, you mount the volume as C:\RCS\DB\backup and the backup fails with an error message like Backup already exist. As advised by Alor, it is a known issue from 8.4.1 because of the update to MongoDB.

Requirements/Conditions/Restraints

• The issue is within the new version of MongoDB which seems not to be able to use directly a directory that is mounted on external storage.

Instructions

In order to mount the external driver:

1. mount the volume as some drive letter, e.g. F:\;

2. download the Juntion tool from Microsoft (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx);

3. link F:\ drive to C:\RCS\DB\backup with a symbolic link;

• junction f: C:\RCS\DB\backup

4. test backup again to see if successful.

Another solution is:

1. create a subfolder inside C:\RCS\DB\backup, let's name it C:\RCS\DB\backup\backup;
2. configure the backup to use that directory with

• rcs-db-config -B C:\RCS\DB\backup\backup

Unable to configure backup to Z:\

In our technical requirements document, for backup we recommend customers to have a SAN or NAS. However, backup will not work if its mounted as a network shared drive (e.g. SMB of NFS) since:

• RCS DB runs as a service with the permission of System;
• user mounted network share cannot be seen by the system and it requires user to login first; this is a problem if the system is rebooted without user login.

In order to overcome this issue, we just need to create a task in the task scheduler. Everything can be left in its default, just take note of these specific settings:

• General ⇒ run using system account;
• Triggers ⇒ at startup;
• Actions ⇒ run the batch file in c:\map_backup_drive.bat;
• Conditions ⇒ start only if there is any network connection.
• Settings ⇒ If task fail, restart every 1 min for up to 3 times, stop task if it runs longer than 1 hour. Do not start new instance.

With respect to the above settings:

1. create the batch file to run net use z: \\123.123.123.123\share /persistent:yes. Change the IP address according to the share drive;
2. ensure that the share can be read and write by everyone.

Attachments

Attached files are the task that you can import directly into the task scheduler and the batch file.

• map_backup_drive.bat

• map_drive