Features

Enterprise

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

InterSystems IRIS natively supports several backup strategies, each designed to address different operational constraints, recovery objectives, and infrastructure capabilities. The Bacula Enterprise IRIS Plugin leverages these native mechanisms where appropriate and integrates them into Bacula’s enterprise-grade backup, catalog, and restore framework.

This section describes the backup modes supported by InterSystems IRIS and clarifies how Bacula Enterprise can be used to implement each strategy with the IRIS Plugin.

External Backup

An External Backup consists of backing up the live contents of the InterSystems IRIS installation while the database instance remains online. Database write activity is temporarily frozen to ensure consistency, allowing an external copy to be taken safely.

This method is commonly used with enterprise storage systems capable of fast snapshots and is frequently adopted by backup solutions that integrate with storage snapshots. The IRIS Plugin focuses on coordinating the IRIS backup commands and transferring the resulting files to Bacula.

Procedure

  1. Freeze database writes using IRIS tooling if required by the external copy method

  2. Create the external copy of IRIS data files

  3. Resume database writes

  4. Register the backup in IRIS backup history

  5. Transfer the resulting files to Bacula Backup Storage

Note

The IRIS Plugin exposes freeze and thaw commands via .query for external snapshot workflows. These are not automatically invoked during backups.

Advantages

  • Zero-downtime backups for most production environments

  • Minimal impact on users and applications

  • Well suited for environments with enterprise snapshot-capable storage

Disadvantages

  • If writes must remain frozen for longer than 10 minutes, special considerations are required to avoid application impact

  • Strong dependency on storage infrastructure capabilities

Bacula Enterprise IRIS Plugin Support

  • Supported for IRIS external backups

  • Bacula coordinates the IRIS commands and captures the resulting files

Online Backup

An Online Backup uses InterSystems IRIS native mechanisms to back up all database blocks into one or more backup files (.cbk) while the database remains online. Data blocks are written in an interleaved fashion, ensuring consistency without pausing write activity.

For restore operations, it is strongly recommended to have a separate InterSystems IRIS instance available in order to validate and test restores without impacting production.

Procedure

  1. Initiated through native InterSystems IRIS commands

  2. Produces native IRIS backup files containing all database blocks

  3. The generated files are sent to Bacula Backup Storage

Advantages

  • Zero-downtime backups for most systems

  • Native support for cumulative and incremental backups (similar to differential and incremental concepts in Bacula)

  • Does not require enterprise-class snapshot-capable storage

Disadvantages

  • Backup and restore operations are relatively slow

  • Restoring a single database requires processing the entire backup file

  • Requires a running InterSystems IRIS instance to perform restores

  • Restore workflows could become cumbersome with large data volumes

  • Backups of encrypted databases are written in unencrypted form, but they can be encrypted with Bacula encryption capabilities

Bacula Enterprise IRIS Plugin Support

✔ Fully supported ✔ Bacula handles scheduling, retention, cataloging, and off-host storage of IRIS-generated backup files

Cold Backup

Cold Backup is performed while the InterSystems IRIS instance is completely shut down. All files are copied in a fully consistent state, without requiring any database coordination mechanisms.

Procedure

  1. Shut down the InterSystems IRIS instance (or the entire host)

  2. Copy all relevant files

  3. Restart the database after completion

Advantages

  • Simple and reliable consistency model

  • Can be implemented using generic file-level or hypervisor-level backups with other Bacula Enterprise Plugins

  • No IRIS-specific backup operations required, even if IRIS Plugin can be helpful to invoke the stop/start functions

Disadvantages

  • Requires database or host downtime

  • Not suitable for environments with strict availability requirements

Bacula Enterprise Support

  • Supported without the IRIS Plugin

  • Can be performed using:

    • Bacula Hypervisor Plugins (VMware, Hyper-V, etc.)

    • The standard Bacula File Daemon for file-level backups

The IRIS Plugin is not strictly required for Cold Backups, as no application-level coordination is needed.

Concurrent External Backup

Concurrent External Backup allows database write activity to continue uninterrupted while database files are copied externally. Because writes occur during the copy, the resulting database files are expected to be dirty (inconsistent). Consistency is restored by following the copy with an Incremental Online Backup, which captures all modified blocks.

During restore, the base copy is restored first, followed by the incremental backup.

Procedure

  1. Clear the incremental change list

  2. Copy database files

  3. Copy IRIS.DAT files

  4. Register the dirty external backup

  5. Perform an incremental online backup (cumulative online backup in IRIS terms)

Advantages

  • Minimal or no interruption to database activity

  • Suitable for environments where Online or External Backup approaches are not viable

Disadvantages

  • Restore process is more complex and time-consuming

  • Multiple components must be restored (database files and incremental backup files)

  • Requires a running InterSystems IRIS instance for restore operations

  • Operational complexity is higher compared to other methods

Bacula Enterprise IRIS Plugin Support

  • Fully supported

  • Plugin orchestrates the coordination between file-level copies and IRIS incremental backups within a unified Bacula job

Summary of Plugin Backup Modes

The Bacula Enterprise IRIS Plugin enables the following IRIS-native backup strategies:

  • Online Backup

  • External Backup

  • Concurrent External Backup

Cold Backups are also supported by Bacula Enterprise through existing mechanisms (File Daemon or Hypervisor Plugins), and while the IRIS Plugin may be useful, it is not strictly required.

This flexibility allows organizations to select the most appropriate protection strategy based on availability requirements, storage capabilities, and recovery objectives, while maintaining centralized management and policy enforcement through Bacula Enterprise.

Feature Summary

Below is a summary of the features this plugin offers:

  • Backup and restore of InterSystems IRIS databases

  • Full, Differential, and Incremental backups using IRIS native commands

  • Support for Online Backup, External Backup, and Concurrent External Backup workflows

  • Instance and database discovery via .ls and .query

  • Database selection and exclusion by name or regex

  • Journal file protection and replay control during restore

  • Backup chain consistency checks with automatic Full fallback

  • Local restore to the same IRIS instance (Linux-only; Windows planned)

See also

Previous articles:

Next articles:

Go back to: IRIS Plugin.