IBM Support

Performing a backup of IBM Safer Payments

Preventive Service Planning


Abstract

The backup of IBM Safer Payments is a nontrivial process as the application writes numerous data in a short time period. Therefore, it is necessary to freeze the IBM Safer Payments folders, to prevent data corruptions in the backup. The disk activity of the backup can slow down Safer Payments significantly and can result in high latency of the incoming transactions. The backup functionality described in this document can be used to take regular backups. These backups can only be used to downgrade IBM Safer Payments if an upgrade fails, or in the case of disaster recovery when all instances are corrupted. In normal operation, every IBM Safer Payments instance has a full copy of all configuration and all data. Therefore, it is recommended to use the internal restore command to recover an IBM Safer Payments instance from another working machine.

Content

Do not use this technical note. It is no longer updated and will be archived. The content has been reviewed, updated, and moved to Backing up IBM Safer Payments on IBM Documentation.

 

The steps below describe the supported way of performing a backup in IBM Safer Payments.

Steps

  1. Shutdown IBM Safer Payments.
  2. Create a backup of the folders listed below:
    • ddc
    • cfg
    • usr
    • inv (Except the arc... folders)
    • key
    • pws
    • eml
    • sai
    • kpi
    • fli (If the instance has unsynchronized messages)

      In addition to these folders, any other folders mentioned in the cluster.iris file should also be included in the backup. Additionally a full system backup of all folders in the system could be performed. There is no need to back up the Safer Payments binary, as this part of the installation package.
  3. Restart IBM Safer Payments.
It is recommended to shut down an instance before performing a backup. However, with some configurations it is not possible due to the length of time it takes to start an instance again after it is stopped. In that case the setOffline API request can be used. However, due to some earlier defects the setOffline API request should only be used on versions 5.7.0.15, 6.0.0.12, 6.1.0.10, 6.2.1.05, 6.3.0.02, 6.4.0.00 or later.
 

The setOffline API request sets an instance to "offline" status, ensuring that all incoming interfaces are de-activated and the deferred writing thread is stopped. The steps for using that request are below:

  1. Send the setOffline API request, specifying the instance that you want to be offline.
  2. You then must use the isOffline API request to check whether an instance is in offline status (which only occurs once the deferred writing thread completes its full dump of data).
  3. Once isOffline returns true, then create a backup of the folders listed above.
  4. After the backup is performed then you can use the setOnline API request to set an instance back to online status.

 

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Document Information

Modified date:
16 January 2026

UID

ibm10730877

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