For me "Automated Backup Tool" is a must have for all Customers that need 24/7, as the users are located around the world. How does Qlik achive this in Qlik Cloud? You hopefully don't stop all Qlik services to have a backup 😉
It is a big issue to us, that we have to shut down services to allow a backup of the system, as we always have users online.
What we need:
- Online Backup (No shutdown of Services necessary)
- Backup only Layout and Scripts (we backup 90 GB of data that is stored in".qvf" - even this is not really necessary as we have all Data in our DWH/.qvd Layer as well)
We made some bad experiences with the previous Qlik Sense RSM backup tool, therefore we want to ensure that this product will last longer, before we use it in customer enviornments.
Unfortunately also this tool does not solve our general issue on Qlik Sense Backup: Again this tool has to stop all services, so Qlik Sense Hub is offline during backup.
Are you aware of any plans to provide an online backup? Or customers want to have a "follow the sun 24/(7)" Self-Service platform; so we can not shut down the environment just for backup.
The current alternative is to do backups only on weekends, but what happens if the server crashes on Thursday and we don't have a backup of all self service objects created since last sunday?
Other issues:
- How to stop all services in a Qlik Sense Cluster environment?
- Backup takes longer the more data you have, which causes the Hub to be offline during the whole backup period as well. --> an option to only backup metadata (scripts and layouts) would be great, as this would minimize downtime.
> Are you aware of any plans to provide an online backup? Or customers want to have a "follow the sun 24/(7)" Self-Service platform; so we can not shut down the environment just for backup.
There is nothing in the product to achieve this functionality. The difficulty for such an implementation is that there isn't a mechanism inside of Qlik Sense to ensure nothing is changing from an app perspective. If content creation is turned off (i.e. users cannot create apps, sheets, stories, bookmarks, etc) and apps aren't reloading, then a live backup is perfectly fine. PostgreSQL will queue any transactions while doing a pg_dump then robocopy / etc the Apps and StaticContent directories.
Honestly I wouldn't use the RSM or QlikSenseUtil in a large environment to begin with, because it's an overly powerful tool. The key elements for me would be:
Certs
You only need these once, but exports of certs is a quick process
Backup of the database
Quick and can be done live
Apps + StaticContent
Approach 1: Have them live on a resilient storage device; if a business' SAN goes down, then they have larger problems than just their BI Tool
Approach 2: Snapshot them from a layer beneath the OS; depending on the efficiency of the snapshotting process.
Most orgs do not care so much about the logs, so a robocopy script can be built out to do a copy of the net new logs can be done should retention of logs be important.
As you mentioned, breaking up the meta-data layer of an app from the data layer would also allow much more in the way of flexibility so do ping your account / partner rep about that voicing a need for this functionality.
No, the Qlik Sense Utility cannot do that. It's use case is a whole site backup rather than aiding in a DevOps process. For exporting without data, you can do this via the QRS API. One approach is outlined here: https://github.com/ahaydon/Qlik-Cli/issues/59