Before You Archive

You can configure to automatically archive business process data as often as you need, or you can archive business process data manually.

For more information about changing the default settings in your archive schedule, see Configure Archive SchedulesConfigure Archive Schedules.

For more information about archiving business process data manually, see Archive Business Process Data ManuallyArchive Business Process Data Manually.

You should not create your own service to back up the data (either manually or on a schedule). Similarly, you should not create your own service and then manually archive data at the same time that an archive process is automatically running (from a schedule in the Archive Manager). It can corrupt archived information as each process could be trying to archive the same data. Use the lock feature in the Archive Manager to prevent simultaneous manual and automatic archiving when using standard backup tools.

Before you begin to archive business process data, you should consider the following:
  • Indicate default values that apply to all business process instances that you run.
  • Schedule archive process depending on the volume of business processes that you run.
  • Archive business level information for audit purposes, including:
    • Documents that support non-repudiation for AS1 and AS2 protocols
    • Correlations that provide searching ability
  • Maintain data in live database tables, to enable faster retrieval for data that you want to view in the immediate future.
  • Separate JVM is not required to back up data, thereby allowing you to allocate more resources to .
  • Archive streamed-in documents that are much larger than the amount of available memory, because documents are not reassembled in memory prior to writing them on the disk. Instead, the backup process reads and writes raw DATA_TABLE pages.
  • In a clustered environment, run the backup process on any one node. If that node goes down, run it on a different node.
If you change the name of the directory used to store document payloads when document storage is set to file system (which is stored in the document_dir property of the jdbc.properties file), you must make the same change in the following properties:
  • RESTORE_DOCUMENT_DIR property of the jdbc.properties file
  • PURGE_DOCDISK_LIST_FILENAME property in the archivethreadproperties file