Product Documentation

FairCom DB V12 Updates

Previous Topic

Next Topic

Back Up Direct to STDOUT and Gain OS Compression and Encryption Support (ctdump)

Database backups are essential, and should be taken at every opportunity and at regular intervals. However, backups are vulnerable to inappropriate access and can consume additional storage space. Encrypting and/or compressing these critical data streams is more important than ever.

The FairCom Database Engine can now redirect backups (dynamic dumps) to an operating system’s standard output (stdout) channel. This makes it easy to use operating system utilities and third-party tools to process backups before you write them to disk. Any file utility that can read and write data from stdin and stdout can take advantage of this feature. In addition, chaining several processes together is very easy. This greatly reduces post-processing steps such that your backups are ready for immediate archiving. For example, you can pipe a backup into gzip to compress the stream, pipe results into ccrypt and encrypt them, and finally pipe the resulting file directly to FTP and transfer to another environment.

The ctdump utility has a new option (‑x) that redirects a backup stream to stdout and sends error and informational messages to stderr. You must remove any processing you applied before using the ctdump utility to restore these backups.

You must remove any processing in reverse order you applied before using the ctdump utility to restore these backups. And don’t lose or forget your encryption keys!

See ctdump

Restore Backups Direct from STDIN (ctrdmp)

The ctrdmp utility now supports the ability to restore a dynamic dump stream being redirected to standard input. To enable this behavior, ctrdmp must be run with the -x option, in addition to providing the proper redirection.

TOCIndex