PowerProtect Data Manager 19.14 File System User Guide

Recovering the PowerProtect agent service from a disaster

You can perform self-service restores of application assets by using a file system or application agent, regardless of the state of the agent service or PowerProtect Data Manager. The information in this section describes how to bring the agent service to an operational state to continue if a disaster occurs and the agent service datastore is lost.

The agent service periodically creates a backup of its datastore in the <agent_service_installation_location>/dbs/v1/backups repository. If all of these backups are lost, the agent service can still start. The agent service discovers all the application systems, assets, and backup copies on the system again, and notifies PowerProtect Data Manager. Depending on when the failure occurred, the agent service might not be able to find older backup copies for some asset types. As a result, the centralized deletion operations might fail when cleaning up the database vendor catalog or removing older backups that are taken before the asset is added to PowerProtect Data Manager.

By default, the agent service backs up consistent copies of its datastore files to the local disk every hour and keeps the copies for 7 days. Each time the agent service backs up the contents of the datastore, it creates a subdirectory under the <agent_service_installation_location>/dbs/v1/backups repository. The subdirectories are named after the time the operation occurred, in the format YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS_epochTime.

By default, the datastore repository is on the local disk. To ensure that the agent service datastore and its local backups are not lost, it is recommended that you back up the datastore through file system backups. You can also change the datastore backup location to a different location that is not local to the system. To change the datastore backup location, update the values in the config.yml file.