5 2 0:HCL Domino Server Restore

Overview

The Lotus Domino (previously Lotus Notes) corporate brand has been first acquired by IBM and then by HCL Technologies. The Lotus Domino product name is now HCL Domino server; however, SEP sesam documentation update (such as screenshots) to reflect these changes is being done in a phased manner, therefore HCL Domino may still appear under the name Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino or IBM Domino.

SEP sesam allows you to restore HCL Domino databases directly to the HCL Domino server system. You can restore a complete HCL Domino database or individual files (database files and transaction log files) in the database.

To perform restore in SEP sesam, you can use the web-based Restore Assistant. From v. ≥ 5.2.0 Artemis the restore procedure in the GUI is no longer available and Restore Assistant is the only method for restoring your data.

You can access the Restore Assistant in one of the following ways:

• via the GUI: by clicking the Restore Assistant icon in the toolbar or from Activities -> Restore Assistant
• from SEP sesam Web UI: left menu -> Restore Assistant
• or by entering the following address in the browser bar: http://[sesamserver]:11401/sep/ui/restore/.

The operations and options available after logging in may differ depending on the user type. Other Web UI display restrictions may depend on the custom roles with specific permissions and the UI mode.
For details, see About Authentication and Authorization and User Roles and Permissions.

You can use the GUI to schedule a restore task (Scheduling -> New -> New Restore Event or Scheduling -> right-click schedule or event -> New Restore Event). For details, see Scheduling Restore.

HCL Domino restore

SEP sesam Restore Assistant allows you to configure a restore job by selecting what you want to restore and where you want to restore your data – to its original location or to a different location. You can also perform point-in-time recovery or disaster recovery.

Note that the Domino API does not provide direct backup and restore options for single emails or documents. Therefore, SEP sesam cannot restore individual email messages directly in the restore wizard. In order to restore individual mails, a workaround is required which will restore the entire database under a temporary name into the file system and then copy individual mail messages. This procedure requires profound knowledge of HCL Domino administration. For details, see section Restoring individual mails.

Restoring HCL Domino databases

The restore over the Domino API can be executed selectively (single or several databases) or fully (typically required only for disaster recovery).

Create a new restore task for the database you want to restore. The following steps are performed in simple UI mode and cover the most common restore cases. For more experienced users, some additional restore options are available in advanced restore mode.

	Note
	This procedure provides specific instructions for restoring a Proxmox VE virtual machine. For general description of the restore procedure in Restore Assistant, refer to Standard Restore Procedure.

1. Open the Restore Assistant: In the Start window, select HCL Domino and click Next.
2. Follow the steps in Restore Assistant to select what you want to restore. For details, see Standard Restore Procedure.
3. In the Target window, you can choose to restore to original or different location:
• To restore to original location, select Restore to original target path option, and then select the relevant execution option.
• To restore a different location, select New restore target option, and browse for the path, or enter it manually. When restoring a database (e.g., user1.nsf) to a new location, HCL Domino automatically detects if it will be restored into a path inside the Domino data path. If you use a different path (e.g., E:/temp/restore) by browsing, the restore is performed as a path restore without transfer to the Domino API. For example, the database is stored in E:/temp/restore/<notespath>/user1.nsf.

Note

With the additional restore option -a logs only the transaction logs from the saveset are stored on the client. You can enter this option under the Expert Options in the fourth Target Settings step of the restore wizard. The Expert Options button for specifying advanced restore options is available only in advanced UI mode (formerly expert GUI mode). To use Expert Options, make sure your UI mode is set to advanced. For details, see Selecting UI mode.

4. Complete the steps in Restore Assistant to configure the restore task. You can start the restore immediately or save and schedule the task for later execution.

Point-in-time recovery

Point-in-time recovery provides a flexible restore by allowing you to bring the state of the database to its state at any time since your backups were taken. This is done by the dbrecover utility which is included in the SEP sesam Client. For details on dbrecover options, see section HCL Domino dbrecover utility.

You can perform point-in-time recovery of the Domino databases with transaction logs from the alternate (recommended) or productive log directory (LogDir).

Prerequisites

• A successful full backup of the database. For details, see IBM (HCL) Domino Server Backup.
• Enabled transaction logging in Archive mode.
• All transaction logs (.txn files) since the last full backup until the time of recovery must be available.

Recovering databases with transaction logs from alternate LogDir

Point-in-time recovery of the Domino databases with transaction logs from the alternate LogDir consists of the following steps:

1. Restore the database to a different location (e.g., C:\temp).
2. Under Execution options, select options Do not overwrite existing items and No recover after restore.
3. Restore all necessary transaction logs (*.txn) to the alternate LogDir (e.g., also C:\temp).
4. The command dbrecover recover_alt gets the required recovery information about the Domino backup API from the alternate LogDir, so you have to add an alternate LogDir (e.g. C:\temp) in the notes.ini by specifying TRANSLOG_RECOVER_PATH=C:\temp\.
5. Start the dbrecover utility in the command line. For example, to restore the database sbold.nsf from 18/12/2018 01:23 pm, you have to execute the following command from the directory <SESAM_BIN>\bin\sesam:

  dbrecover recover_alt "c:\temp\sbold.nsf" "18/12/18 01:23 pm"

The output should be similar to the following:

 $Id: dbrecover.c,v 1.13 2019/04/16 17:08:06 miraculix Exp $
 Recovering backup file ...
 MRecover with DBRECOVER_ZAP_ID
 Recover with DBRECOVER_ALT_RETRIEVE_PATH: The archived log extents must be placed into the 
 TRANSLOG_RECOVER_PATH NOTES.INI
 Recover with DBRECOVER_POINT_IN_TIME 18/12/15 01:23 pm
 [039C:0002-0910] Media Recovery Replay (212 MB): 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 100%
 [039C:0002-0910] 18.12.2015 16:35:57   Recovery Manager: Media Recovery complete for E:\RECOVER- 
 TEST\sbold.nsf, last update applied 18.12.2015 13:22:52. 
 Backup file c:\temp\sbold.nsf recovered. 
 Program completed successfully.

6. Then copy the database into the HCL Domino Server file space.

Recovering databases with transaction logs from productive LogDir

To perform point-in-time recovery of the Domino databases with transaction logs from the productive LogDir, proceed as follows:

1. Restore the database to a different location (e.g., C:\temp).
2. Under Execution options, select options Do not overwrite existing items and No recover after restore.
3. Make sure that all required transaction logs exist in the LogDir of the HCL Domino server (if necessary, through separate restores) because dbrecover gets the required recover information over the Domino API.
4. Start the dbrecover utility in the command line. For example, to restore the database rbogner.nsf from 11/02/2018 04:00 am, you have to execute the following command from the directory <SESAM_BIN>\bin\sesam:

  dbrecover recover c:\temp\rbogner.nsf "11/02/18 04:00 am"

The output should be similar to the following:

 $Id: dbrecover.c,v 1.13 2019/04/16 17:01:09 miraculix Exp $
  Recovering backup file ...
 Media Recovery Replay (60 MB): 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
 11.02.2018 10:08:52   Recovery Manager: Media Recovery complete for c:\temp\rbogner.nsf, last 
 update applied 11.02.2018 03:48:23.
  Backup file c:\temp\rbogner.nsf recovered. 
 Program completed successfully.

5. Then copy the database into the HCL Domino Server file space.

Restoring single mails

	Note
	A direct restore of single mails or documents from HCL Domino databases is not possible because of the special functionality of the Domino API. Single mails can only be restored from backups with the profound knowledge of the HCL Domino administrator.

The following simplified scenario shows how the HCL Domino administrator can restore single documents/mails.

Example:

Today, the user of the mail database user1.nsf has accidentally deleted a few days old email. This email must exist in the last night’s backup. HCL Domino cannot restore an existing database into a different directory or with a different name on the same server directly over the Domino API, because Domino will notice that a database with the same replica-ID already exists.

The only solution is that you restore the database into the file system, then you have to create a copy of this database, and have to copy the required email from it to the restore destination.

As an administrator, proceed as follows to restore a single mail:

1. Restore the database user1.nsf on the Domino server into the file system (not in Domino data root!).
2. Open user1.nsf locally with the Domino client or the Domino administrator and create a copy with the name user1a.nsf on the Domino server. Creating this new copy assigns a different replica-ID to the database user1a.nsf than the original user1.nsf has. Therefore HCL Domino recognizes them as two completely different databases.
3. Give the necessary access rights to open both databases. Then copy the required email from user1a.nsf to user1.nsf.
4. After restoring the email, delete the database user1a.nsf.

Monitoring restore

You can monitor the restore progress using the Web UI (Monitoring -> Restores) or view the status in the GUI (Main Selection -> Job State -> Restores). Restore overview provides detailed information on the last run of restore jobs, including the task name, status (successful, error, in queue...), start and stop time of the last backup, data size, throughput, client and message.

Disaster recovery

Prerequisites

To prepare an HCL Domino server for a possible disaster recovery, the following backups are required:

• Operating system
  • Windows
    • system partition with VSS
    • backup of system data (system_state)
    • backup of the Domino application (directory with the Domino binaries)
  • Linux
    • complete Linux system without Domino data (all-backup)
    • backup of partition data (disk_info)
• HCL Domino online backup of all Domino databases with the source all. For details, see Configuring IBM (HCL) Domino backup.

Steps

1. In case of a disk crash, first the OS and the HCL Domino program files are restored.

	Note
	It is important that you do not start the Domino service at this point!

2. Next, the HCL Domino data is restored as a path backup to the original Domino data path with overwrite existing files option. Hereby all databases, transaction logs, ID-files and the notes.ini are copied to the server.
3. Before starting, you have to delete file(s) nlogctrl.* in the log directory.
4. After the successful restore of all Domino databases, you can start the Domino service. During startup, the Domino server automatically checks the consistency of the databases and recovers their state.

Note that the Domino recovery procedure may take some time. This depends on the number of the restored databases and their volume.

HCL Domino dbrecover utility

SEP sesam provides the Domino recover utility dbrecover which allows to archive HCL Domino logs and to perform database recovery and restore. It also allows point-in-time recovery, as described in the section Point-in-time recovery.

	Note
	Do not use dbrecover ARCHIVE together with SEP sesam incremental backups because the archived logs may not be backed up with SEP sesam, if they are already backed up into files. Therefore the files may be missing during SEP sesam HCL Domino database recovery.

The following dbrecover arguments are displayed with the dbrecover usage:

#>dbrecover
$Id: dbrecover.c,v 1.13 2017/04/16 17:01:09 miraculix Exp $

Usage: dbrecover <option> [input file] [restore db|datetime]

option: ARCHIVE - Archive system logs.   (Input file NOT REQUIRED)
        CHECK   - Check a database or backup file.    (Input file REQUIRED)
        RECOVER - Recover a backup file. (Input file REQUIRED, DateTime optional)
        RECOVER_ALT - Recover with archive log extends in TRANSLOG_RECOVER_PATH. (Input file REQUIRED)
        NOTE    - Recover a backup file and get Note info. (Input file REQUIRED)
        NOTE_ALT    - Recover get Note info with log extends in TRANSLOG_RECOVER_PATH (Input file REQUIRED)
        RESTORE - Restore a database.    (Input file & restore db REQUIRED)

input file: - Path to a backup file.   (If REQUIRED)

restore db: - Path to the database to be restored.   (If REQUIRED)

datetime  : - Date and time in system format, e.g., '01/01/18 12:01 AM' (optional)

Hint:   To specify an .ini file, add an argument preceded by the equal sign ('='), e.g., 
'=../notes.ini'

Option RECOVER

If selected, a Database Instance Identifier (DBIID) of the recovered file is refreshed, allowing access to the original database (DB) and to the recovered version. This option creates a new instance of the original database, therefore a separate backup is required for this new instance in order to enable it to be also recovered at the time of need.

Option RESTORE

If selected, the original DB's DBIID is not refreshed and a new instance is not created. This option deletes the original DB when it is offline and replaces it with the recovered backup file.

For more information on transaction logging and DBIID, see Enabling transaction logging in Archive mode.

External references

• IBM Domino 10.0.1 Administrator Help
• HCL Domino 11 Documentation

See also

Standard Restore Procedure – IBM Domino Server Configuration – IBM Domino Server Backup

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