Reload System Design

How you implement your Reload system depends on what your GroupWise is hosted on.

Reload is a backup system and recovery system. It is built around the idea that 2 is 1 and 1 is none, in other words. if you have two copies of your data then in something happens you still have one copy available.

Reload can be configured save a backup of your production system, send a copy to an offsite server and to a cloud host to maximize data safety.

Reload for GroupWise

Reload for GroupWise backs up your domain and post office(s) so you can restore items and users. There is also a disaster recovery mode that allows you to use the Reload server as a POA if a POA goes down.

You should expect to allocate 150% of the space your current GroupWise Post Office is taking up.

GroupWise on Linux

If GroupWise is on Linux, there are two models for backing up the data:

• Collector/Server
• Server Only

Collector/Server Model

The collector model is built for speed. Backups that take too long to create are not very useful.

The collector is a Linux software agent that makes a copy locally on the post office server and then uses rsync to send it to up to three Reload servers.

Server Only

The server model uses DBCopy across NFS to copy the production POA across the network to the Reload server.

Restore Options

• Restore Mode Restore

With GroupWise on Linux, you have the option to restore emails using the GroupWise Restore Area, which allows users to restore items themselves just by going to File | Open Backup, if the item is in the latest backup.

• Access Mode Restore

When a backup is loaded a POA is activated. The client can connect to the Reload Access Mode POA. Items can be saved to a local archive and unarchived to the production GroupWise server.

• Restore all items for a user from Reload via GroupWise Administration

With a Restore Area in place, you can restore all items for a user from GroupWise Administration.

• Restore all items for all users from Reload, via a bash script

With Disaster Recovery setup, you can use a bash script to restore all items back to the production GroupWise Post Office.

GroupWise on Windows

Server Only Model

If GroupWise is on Windows, you may only use the Server model for backing up the data.

Restore Options

• Restore Mode Restore

With GroupWise on Linux, you have the option to restore emails using the GroupWise Restore Area, which allows users to restore items themselves just by going to File | Open Backup, if the item is in the latest backup.

• Access Mode Restore

When a backup is loaded a POA is activated. The client can connect to the Reload Access Mode POA. Items can be saved to a local archive and unarchived to the production GroupWise server.

Reload for Retain

Retain is our email archiving product which can hold billions of items. Over time items are removed from the production email system and so Retain ends up holding the only copy of data. This is bad from a data safety point of view. Since Retain stores items in a very large (16.7+ million) sub-directory structure, many backup programs struggle to transfer it all in a reasonable time.

We had a customer that was attempting to do daily backups of Retain which were taking 40 hours to complete. That was not a functional solution. We created Reload for Retain and once the initial backup was complete daily backup times were reduced to 40 minutes, saving two orders of magnitude in time.

You should expect to allocate 114% of the space your current Retain Server is taking up.

Reload Agent

The Reload Agent handles the transfer of the Retain archive, index, and database. It is a Linux-based program and can be placed on the Retain server, Reload server or an intermediate server.

Retain on Linux

• You may place the Reload Agent on the Retain Server or another server.

Retain on Windows

• You must place the Reload agent on the Reload server or on an intermediate Linux server.