<n>This article was originally published on the <a href="http://encodo.com/en/blogs.php?entry_id=188"><b>Encodo Blogs</b></a>. Browse on over to see more!</n> <hr> Perforce servers have a checkpointing mechanism in order to back up the server metadata. That checkpoint, along with the depot data and a journal file (for changes made since the checkpoint was taken) are enough to restore a Perforce database. Here at Encodo, we take a checkpoint every evening right before the depot files are backed up. We retain a few days worth of these checkpoints, just in case. Since our server runs on Debian Etch (Linux), we have a Bash script to do all of this (included below). The comments in the script should be enough to get a gist of what's going on; adjust the values of the variables at the top of the script to correspond to your installation. <code> #!/bin/bash BACKUP_DIR=/home/p4/backup DEPOT_DIR=/home/p4/srvroot P4=/opt/p4/p4 HOST=p4:1666 USER=root PASSWORD=password DAYS_TO_KEEP=3 # Verify the depot $P4 -p $HOST -u $USER -P $PASSWORD verify -q //... > /dev/null $P4 -p $HOST -u $USER -P $PASSWORD verify -u -q //... > /dev/null 2> /dev/null # Take a checkpoint $P4 -p $HOST -u $USER -P $PASSWORD admin checkpoint > /dev/null # Move all journal and checkpoint files to the backup folder mv $DEPOT_DIR/journal.* $BACKUP_DIR mv $DEPOT_DIR/checkpoint.* $BACKUP_DIR # Remove old checkpoint and journal files find $BACKUP_DIR/journal.* -mtime +$DAYS_TO_KEEP -exec rm -f {} \; > /dev/null 2> /dev/null find $BACKUP_DIR/checkpoint.* -mtime +$DAYS_TO_KEEP -exec rm -f {} \; > /dev/null 2> /dev/null </code> Once you have regular checkpoints for backup, your data is safe. However, after a while, a Perforce server accumulates no small amount of cruft in its metadata, slowing down some common operations. A Perforce server can be optimized by replacing the database metadata with the contents of a checkpoint. When metadata is restored from a checkpoint, that metadata is imported in a pruned, balanced and optimized way, ensuring optimal performance. In order to do this, you basically take a checkpoint, stop the server, restore the checkpoint and restart the server. Luckily for you, Encodo has a Bash script for that as well. The basic process is described in more detail in <a href="http://blog.perforce.com/blog/?p=187" source="p4 blog" author="Rusty Jackson">Perforce database maintenance</a>. The comments in the script should be enough to get a gist of what's going on; adjust the values of the variables at the top of the script to correspond to your installation. <code> # This script describes a way of optimizing and cleaning the metadata for a Perforce server # The following steps are copied from the following URL: # - <http://blog.perforce.com/blog/?p=187> # - Stop your server # - Take a checkpoint # - Move your existing db files to a save directory # - Recover from the checkpoint # - Check for errors during restore # - Restart your server # - Delete the files from the save directory # Instead of deleting the old database files immediately after the process, we # delete them during the next run instead. BACKUP_DIR=/home/p4/backup DEPOT_DIR=/home/p4/srvroot P4D=/opt/p4/p4d LOG_FILE=/var/log/p4d-error # - Take a checkpoint echo "Taking a checkpoint..." /opt/scripts/p4d/makecheckpoint.sh # - Stop your server echo "Stopping the Perforce server..." /etc/init.d/p4d stop # - Delete the files from the save directory echo "Backing up current database..." rm -R $BACKUP_DIR/db # - Move your existing db files to a save directory mkdir $BACKUP_DIR/db mv $DEPOT_DIR/db.* $BACKUP_DIR/db/ # - Recover from the checkpoint CHECKPOINT_FILE=`ls -h --sort=time $BACKUP_DIR/checkpoint* | head -1` echo "Do you wish to restore from checkpoint '$CHECKPOINT_FILE'?" select yn in "Yes" "No"; do case $yn in Yes ) echo "Restoring checkpoint..."; su p4 -c "$P4D -r $DEPOT_DIR -L $LOG_FILE -jr $CHECKPOINT_FILE"; break;; No ) echo "Optimization aborted; restoring previous database..."; mv $BACKUP_DIR/db/db.* $DEPOT_DIR/; break;; esac done # - Restart your server /etc/init.d/p4d start </code>