Avaya 7.8 manual Backing Up The Voice Recordings, Moving to a New PC

7.6 Backing Up The Voice Recordings

ContactStore stores voice recordings in the path you specify on the System Setting Server page. This path quickly fills up with thousands of directories and millions of files. When the partition is nearly full, the server maintains only a tiny amount of free space on the partition by deleting batches of 100 recordings (and the directory that catalogued them) at a time, as it requires space for new recordings. This causes a huge churn of files every day on a large system.

Limitations of Full and Incremental Backup Procedures

On a ContactStore server, two issues make it difficult to back up voice files:

∙the file size

∙the rate of change of the voice recording files

Together these issues make most traditional backup strategies for the voice recordings ineffective. Traditional full backups are required more frequently than normal, which wastes backup media, and incremental backups are larger than expected because of the large churn of creations and deletions. For a backup strategy to be successful, it must be easy to restore the data if necessary.

Traditional “full plus incremental” backup solutions are ineffective because these backup solutions cannot complete fully. In the event of a complete disk failure, the process restores the full backup, then the increments in chronological order. This procedure immediately overflows the disk when the restore program tries to create the increments because the partition holding the call is almost at capacity to begin with. The full plus incremental backup will fail because it runs out of disk space before it has processed the “removals” part of the procedure. Traditional restore procedures are also ineffective. If you use this solution to review a recording that has been deleted because of age, the ContactStore service immediately deletes any restored file as part of its disk maintenance. Finally, traditional backup solutions often require locks on the disk while they work. This can seriously disrupt the working of the recorder.

This simplest and cheapest strategy for backing up the recordings is to use the built in DVD+RW archive mechanism. This is not only fully integrated with the workings of the recorder and its search and replay mechanism, but also is well suited to the incremental recording required for a recorder. As recordings are added to the calls path they are copied to DVD in an efficient manner. Even when they have been deleted from the hard disk, the recorder is still able to play them because it knows which DVD they are on and can replay directly from DVD, without an intervening ‘restoration’ step. Each DVD holds about 4GB, which means it can hold about 150 channel-days worth of recordings from a busy system. For less than dollar a day, even a busy system can have limitless backup.

7.7 Moving to a New PC

If it becomes necessary to move the ContactStore server to a new PC, use the following process.

1.Take backup of call details database

55.

2. Install ContactStore on the new server PC.

3.Restore the call details database

55to new machine.

4.Copy the calls folder used by the previous server to the location (Server Call Storage Path) set for the new server.

IP Office ContactStore 7.8	Page 56
IP Office	15-601038 Issue 4b (06 July 2009)