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Cognos Express Backups: How to Create an Effective CX and TM1 Backup Strategy

Backing up your TM1 and/or Cognos Express environment is vital.  Without it, you potentially could lose months of work and cost your organisation a motza.  Good disaster recovery planning will help alleviate this risk.

There is a Backup tool available in the Manager screen of Cognos Express that backs up and restores your entire Cognos Express environment.  Unfortunately this does not allow restoring of specific elements of your system.  Thus we need to dig a little deeper to give us the flexibility to backup and restore what we need.

Backups can be done at a number of levels within Cognos Express, namely:

  1. Entire Cognos Express backup. From the Cognos Express Manager screen in Cognos Connection. These backups are quite large and should be used and managed carefully, deleting old backups regularly. This method is especially good for moving data from one server to another and is not recommended for active use.
  2. TM1 Archiving Process – create TI process which saves all TM1 data to disk and then creates a date and time based zip file. This can be run manually. For more information on creating this TI, please see this post.
  3. TM1 Backup Processes – create TI processes for Daily, Weekly and Monthly backups (similar to the Archive above) that create a zip file that is overwritten each time it is run.  Then create Chores for each, running Daily @ 11:30pm, Weekly on Sunday at 10:30pm and every 30 days at 9:30pm.
  4. TM1 Data Save Process – create a TI process that saves the current TM1 data to disk. This can be run manually and is also set to be run by a Chore each hour on the hour. From this the TM1 environment can be rebuilt as at the last hour from these files.
  5. Cognos BI Administration/Configuration/Content Administration – create Deployment Archives for Daily @ 11pm, Weekly on Sunday @ 10pm and Monthly  on the 1st of the Month @ 9pm, so you can restore Cognos Connection at any of these points.
  6. Have a file system backup of the Cognos Express server to cover Framework Manager models, the deployments from Cognos Connection and saved TM1 data.

Good luck and make sure you test you can restore from all of these!

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John Vaughan

John Vaughan

John is a CPA, MBA and has been a Performance Management consultant for over 25 years. He is the founder of ExploringTM1 and highly regarded for his experience combining financial management with corporate planning, reporting and analysis. He lives in Sydney with his wife, two of his three children, their cat, Freckles, a bunch of chooks and some fish. John is a sports nut, who played rugby until he was 40, started playing football at 54 and loves being outdoors.

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