About backups and recovery

Frequent vault backups are critical to safeguarding the valuable documents residing in TeamWork vaults. You should make backups daily, even if you have implemented Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) or other data redundancy systems. Vault backups allow you to recover from failures that are not disk-related, such as human or software errors. Even though you will lose all documents and metadata created after the last backup and the vault recovery process can be quite time-consuming, restoring a backup is in most cases the last resort and it enables you to recover from virtually all emergency cases.

You use the TeamWork Administrator wizards to create and restore vault backups. The Prepare for Backup Wizard prepares backup files for a vault, which can then be backed up to a safe location by your normal backup software. The Restart After Restore From Backup Wizard restores a vault from files created by the Prepare for Backup Wizard.

Warning    You must use the TeamWork wizards or their command-line equivalents to make and restore vault backups. Simply backing up and restoring the TeamWork vault folders is insufficient and can result in lost data. This is for two reasons. The first reason is that only the TeamWork tools will ensure that all pending transactions are committed to the vault database before a backup is made and no data is lost. The second reason is that most third-party backup programs do not back up files that are in use, and a vault’s database files are in use whenever the EDM Server service is running.

TeamWork tracks the amount of time elapsed since a vault was last prepared for backup. When you open TeamWork Administrator tool, a warning message is shown if any vaults have not been prepared for backup in over five days. This interval may be adjusted with the AlertNoBackup registry key described in Windows registry keys. The Status column in the EDM Server vault list TeamWork Administrator also shows the backup status of vaults.