Sitecore - Managing Lucene indexes and database backups

Question

Sitecore.NET 6.6.0 (rev. 130404)

Our production setup contains a separate web server and database server. Web server hosts the sitecore website as well as the sitecore data folder (including indexes). Database server (obviously) hosts the sitecore databases.

In managing DB backups, taking SQL DB backups is not enough, we also have to include Lucene indexes in our backups. Otherwise, in an emergency situation, even if we have the SQL DBs, the website won't function because it depends on Lucene indexes for content searching.

Rebuilding indexes is also not an option for us. Indexes based on web database will take an hour or two to rebuild. The ones based on Master database will take more than 40 hours to rebuild due to the large no. of content items in the master database.

What are the usual practices involved in taking DB backups in this kind of a setup?

Teeknow Teeknow · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-03T23:41:04

Making file system copies of the /sitecore/data/indexes directory will work just fine, but you need to be careful about how you're backing it up. If you try to take a backup while the site is running, you'll get a bad backup due to the way Lucene manages locking on the index's files. Make sure all aspects of your sitecore instance are offline before taking the backup.

If this is not possible for you (which it sounds like it isn't because you're on a production environment), you have two options:

1) Make a staging environment where content is initially entered before being published to production and take your offline backups from there, or

2) Modify Velir's Lucene Index Refresher to make backups for you.

Sitecore - Managing Lucene indexes and database backups

2 Answers