May 21, 2009

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I've written before about what I think is the killer feature that really separates Lotus Notes from its competition. When it comes to application and data mobility, that feature is Replication.

Replication is simply the process Notes uses to keep multiple copies of the same application in sync. It's very efficient, working down to the field level. So if you change one tick-box on a form in Notes, only that tick-box information is replicated across to other copies.

Because of this, replication can become a poor-man's backup solution.

Now I'm not advocating this as your ONLY backup solution. That would be pretty reckless of me to do so with your data. So, here's the disclaimer. You should ALWAYS utilize good backup software that has agents specifically designed for backing up open Lotus Notes applications. This is essential to protecting your data. So do it, okay?

Alright, now that's out of the way let's consider everything in the rest of this article as kind of the suspenders to go with the belt. It's always good to have too much data backed up instead of not enough. Here's are several ways for you to utilize replication to keep as much data safe as possible.

Local Replicas of Mail Files and Applications

The first thing I want to suggest is that every single user has a local replica of their mail file on their machine. Administrators generally implement this rule on laptop users to allow disconnected access for the user whilst on the road. I would suggest you do it for every desktop user as well.

Many times, I've seen instances where a company doesn't set up local replicas for desk-bound employees. The employees hit the server copy of their mail file, so it isn't really needed right? Wrong. Having a local replica can be very useful.

For example, let's say the server crashes completely and the data can not be recovered. If you have a local replica, the user still has access to old email. You can take that local replica and put it on a new server and reconfigure the user to have them up quickly.

Now if you have a typical backup solution in place, the Lotus administrator will be able to get back the last good backup off of tape or the storage network from the night before. Then they have to rebuild the server and place the backed-up mail database (which could be out of date by half a day or more) back on the server. All the while this is taking place, the user is without email.

Having the local replica allows your support team to get these people back up and working, with all of their old, most up-to-date email very quickly.

Also, as an administrator or developer, you may want to replicate certain mission critical applications down to your local hard drive as well. That allows you to keep an extra replica around just in case.

As a quick note, make sure that you always encrypt local replicas you create on the hard drives of users. This secures the database so only that user's ID file can open it up and access the data.

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