Many of us have experienced the cold sweat associated with doing a restore of critical files after a system crash, and the premature appearance of gray hairs as we did some checking to make sure that everything was normal again. You thought back to all the times you said, "I will definitely do a test restore this week, just to make sure my backups are working." But you never found the time, and it was now do or die. The arrival of 24/7 e-business has really been a savior for people like us, because it prompted software developers like St. Bernard to address the problem of backing up dynamic systems, or to make life easier for lazy system administrators who can actually knock off work early.

If your company is heavily involved in e-commerce, B2B, B2C etc., it is obviously a 24-hour affair. E-business does not start at 9.00 a.m. and finish at 5.00 p.m. So, scheduling your nightly backups has become problematic, because so many files are permanently open and active. They will either be skipped during the backup, or saved to tape in a corrupted state. If you are not aware of this, you are living with a false sense of security, so it might be worth checking out now how your backup software treats active, open files.

Open File Manager addresses the problems associated with file skipping, users locked out during backups and forced backups. Do open files get skipped? Some backup programs will come back later and retry, but most open applications will still be open and, therefore, their files will get skipped again. Do users get locked out of their applications? This is obviously not desirable in a busy e-commerce environment. Are backups forced? If they are it could be tricky. Changes occur to an open file during the backup of that file; parts of the changes might get captured by the backup software, while other parts may be in areas of the file that have already been read for backup. Hence, the data on tape will be corrupt. This is a very dangerous situation, since you could end up restoring corrupt files, i.e. useless data.

Another inherent, but perhaps unconsidered issue concerns groups of files containing related data that could lose their relational integrity if they are open and changing during a forced backup. Open File Manager heads this off by synchronizing the data at a point in time when it is stable, across the entire disk volume, guaranteeing a coherent backup while maintaining the relational integrity among groups of related files.

Open File Manager enhances your existing backup strategy, capturing open files on Windows NT/2000 and NetWare platforms, even if they are changing during the backup. Working in conjunction with all major backup software packages, you can run the backup at anytime without interruption to users, so there is no need to close applications or log out sessions. Changing your backup software will have no effect on Open File Manager, and you can continue to use the licenses you purchased if you do change it. Falling somewhere between the categories of data security and disaster recovery, Open File Manager adds an additional protective layer to your company's data protection strategy by ensuring that critical data is backed up completely and uncorrupted in a seamless and transparent manner. What you want to avoid is an incomplete restore, if and when you have to perform one.

This is how it works. Open File Manager monitors the file system for read requests coming from a backup program and determines when there are no partial transactions pending on the system. It then kicks in and begins maintaining a dynamically allocated Pre-Image Cache for all open files on the system. Only changed data is stored in the Pre-Image Cache, and not entire files. In fact, Open File Manager only caches data necessary to ensure an accurate image of open files for the backup, and does so in 1Kb increments, thus minimizing the amount of empty disk space required.

When the backup application reaches the part of a file that has been changed, Open File Manager substitutes the original (pre-write) data from the Pre-Image Cache to fulfill the backup request. Just think of how important this is for email, database, accounting and sales contact programs, the very lifeblood of companies, running round the clock. Open File Manager will fill in the gaps more accurately than a standard backup application could. The file on tape will then look exactly like it did when the backup process started, resulting in a complete, accurate backup and restore.

You can configure Open File Manager to release the pre-write data for a file after it is backed up, after it has been read for the backup applications verify pass, or after the backup application terminates. This gives you the flexibility to manage system disk space with respect to backup program functionality. If system disk space is scarce, Open File Manager can discard pre-write data as soon as a file is backed up. If disk space is not so constrained, Open File Manager can hold the pre-write data until the backup verify pass is complete, giving cowards like me additional confidence in the backup.

Open File Manager may also be used for purposes other than backup. You might, for example, want to place a copy of a live database on another machine for training or testing purposes. This can be done by using the Open File Copy feature. You just log in to the server containing the live database, using a login ID that has been registered in the Open File Manager agent configuration, and then proceed to use any normal copy utility (e.g. Windows Explorer or the DOS COPY command) to copy the live files easily. This is certainly a handy bonus. There is so much more to say about this package, but I hope I have hit the high spots. One that I did leave out was the excellent user interface facilitating ease-of-use.
   

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