Good day, all! Now that I've finally gotten our campus backup solution working with my koha server, I'm getting ready to advance my installation beyond the relatively basic, out-of-the-box stage in which I've kept it since going with a "soft live" launch in January. This got me thinking. In the land of my former system (it had a lot of I's in it), the record processing component of the software was stopped during times of backup or during times when changes could be made to methods/modules/etc. that would send results to the processing program, like a system upgrade. This starting and stopping was never done directly by a user, of course--rather, it was scripted into the options of the user interface. Thus, the questions: Should koha-common be stopped before backups are performed? Before any type of software upgrade? Are there other programs that need to be stopped as well, like the indexer (we're still using the "old method")? If anything should be stopped, is there an order in which they should be stopped (and, I imagine, restarted--in reverse order)? Backups by default (utilizing Tivoli, for those morbidly curious) are run with static serialization (a file must not change during its backup, or the backup of that file will fail). Dynamic serialization backups (in which files CAN change as they're being written to the backup device) are available, but I'm not particularly confident in the configuration of those on the backup server side given a few incidents with the old server, which was set up for this type of backup. Because we're no longer running circulation and very little will be done on the server outside of monthly Serials Solutions record loads and payment tracking, I expect no problems here, but it's worth mentioning. A followup--Will static serialization suffice for backup, or should dynamic serialization be invoked, especially if none of the processes associated with koha are stopped prior to backup running? I'm appreciative of any feedback anyone can provide for these questions. Thank you for your time and consideration! John -- -=<*>=- -=<*>=- -=<*>=- -=<*>=- -=<*>=- -=<*>=- -=<*>=- -=<*>=- -=<*>=- John E. Sterbenz, Jr. Associate Librarian Manager, Technical Services, Collections, and Library Automation 701 Tappan Street, Rm. K3359 Kresge Business Administration Library The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA 48109-1234 TEL: (734) 764-5746 FAX: (734) 764-4162