sugoi

Using dedicated drives for Plastic and a good incremental block-based backup (like Macrium Reflect) might fit your needs. I only have a very small number of repos and all are small, but I use Macrium to backup my OS drive and an incremental backup is very fast. Since readonly mode was released, I wrote a few powershell helpers to put plastic in readonly mode, run the backup and put plastic back in normal model. It uses MailAlert.exe to send me an email if something went wrong. I'll paste it below for future travelers. function Main() { $mailAlert = 't:\MailAlert\MailAlert.exe'; $errorMailSubject = "Error with PLASTIC backup"; RunPlasticCommand -Command 'admin readonly enter' -FailureMessage 'Failed to run pre-backup command'; ExitIfWrongReadonlyStatus -Active; #run your backup here RunPlasticCommand -Command 'admin readonly leave' -FailureMessage 'Failed to run post-backup command'; ExitIfWrongReadonlyStatus -Inactive; } function RunPlasticCommand { Param( [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)] [String]$Command, [String]$FailureMessage ) $psi = New-object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo; #$psi.CreateNoWindow = $true; $psi.UseShellExecute = $false; $psi.RedirectStandardOutput = $true; $psi.RedirectStandardError = $true; $psi.FileName = 'C:\Program Files\PlasticSCM5\client\cm.exe'; $psi.Arguments = $Command; $process = New-Object System.Diagnostics.Process; $process.StartInfo = $psi; [void]$process.Start(); $stdout = $process.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd(); $stderr = $process.StandardError.ReadToEnd(); $didExit = $process.WaitForExit(2 * 60000); # 2 minutes timeout, change according to your server if (!$didExit) { $process.Kill(); ExitWithTimeoutMessage; } $iCmExitCode = $process.ExitCode; if ($iCmExitCode -ne 0) { $errorMail = "$FailureMessage. Exit code $iCmExitCode. stdout: $stdout stderr: $stderr"; Start-Process -FilePath $mailAlert -ArgumentList ("-s ""$errorMailSubject"" -b ""$errorMail"""); DisableReadonlyMode; Exit 1; # 1=backup error } return $process.ExitCode, $stdout, $stderr; } function ExitWithTimeoutMessage { $errorMail = "$FailureMessage. Timeout waiting for commmand to complete. Command: $Command"; Start-Process -FilePath $mailAlert -ArgumentList ("-s ""$errorMailSubject"" -b ""$errorMail"""); DisableReadonlyMode; Exit 1; # 1=backup error } ###################################################### # WILL DISABLE READONLY MODE BEFORE EXITING ###################################################### function ExitIfWrongReadonlyStatus { Param( [Switch]$Active, [Switch]$Inactive ) $iExitCode, $StdOut, $StdErr = RunPlasticCommand -Command 'admin readonly status' $StringToFind = if ($Active) {"Active"} elseif ($Inactive) {"Inactive"}; if (!($StdOut -like "*$StringToFind*")) { if ($Active) { DisableReadonlyMode; } $errorMail = "Fail. Plastic readonly mode is |$StdOut| but should be |$StringToFind|"; Start-Process -FilePath $mailAlert -ArgumentList ("-s ""$errorMailSubject"" -b ""$errorMail"""); Exit 1; # 1=backup error } } function DisableReadonlyMode { #if the server should be non-readonly, try to leave readonly mode before exiting RunPlasticCommand -Command 'admin readonly leave' -FailureMessage 'Failed to put server in non-readonly mode before exiting! The server will never leave readonly mode!'; } #run the main function Main;

Hey, @manu, @psantos, any update on the "readonly mode" command for the server?

Very interesting answer. I really like the idea of putting the server in readonly mode, it would work really well. The replication scenario isn't as interesting for a smaller shop, since it would incur maintenance costs (extra server or cloud) and introduce extra steps: * setup automatic replication * detect when replication is done, then stop the secondary server to put its DB into consistent state * create the backup * spin up the secondary server But for this to be more reliable, we would have to also set monitoring of the secondary server, and failure recovery as well, so the first server won't go crazy when automatic replication kicks in the the secondary is dead. We also need to be careful not to stop the secondary during a replication. With the readonly option it would be very simple to perform the backups using the same setup most of us already have (setups that stop the server before the backup operation, then start the server again). Of course, a in-house backup solution would be even better, as it would have access to Plastic's internals and could speed up backups immensely. One thing that comes to mind is the timestamps in SQLite DBs. Restarting the Plastic server changes the timestamps and the DBs are seem as changed by the backup tools, which, in turn, wastes time as the tool will have to check the file to see what exactly changed (for incremental/differential backups, the entire file will need to be read). Thanks for such a detailed answer. Really looking forward to seeing how Jet will turn out! P.S.: Incidentally, are you planning on enabling Jet on community/open source licenses as well, or only for team/enterprise licenses?

Hi. I saw that Plastic 6 has an all new, super fast backend named Jet and got really curious about it. I didn't see anything mentioned about backups, so I decided to ask how it will work. Do you have to stop the server and copy the files like SQLite or is there support for backing the system up like SQL Server, where you can backup without stopping the server. Thanks!