Working with in-memory applications like TM1 it’s essential to have a working backup strategy. TM1 doesn’t provide any built-in functionality for this but with little help from 3rd party tools one can easily build up a lightweight and working backup solution. What you need is 7zbackup, 7-Zip 9.20 and Windows PowerShell 2.0.

Getting started, step 1: Modify the “selection file”

(Notice: I personally needed to go back to version 7zbackup 1.8.5 stable to get the script running succesfully.)

After installing the required applications start with modifying the 7zbackup “selection” config file. That’s the file that contains the configuration needed to run through the backup process. There are many different parameters that you can modify but let’s just go through the most important ones.

includesource=<path_to_your_tm1_datafiles_folder>\datafiles|alias=PROD

Here you define what to back up. Datafiles folder is the heart of TM1 so you need to back it up entirely. If you want you can also include the logfiles folder but its not necessary.

rotate=60

As it says in the comment line This variable holds the number of historical archive backups you want to keep on target media. I tend to play safe and there’s disk space available nowadays so two months of rotation should be enough. Just remember to copy the actual backup zips to remote location periodically so you got also a real disaster recovery possibility.

There are also other parameters you may like to config but this will do it for us now.

Step 2: Set up a batch file to run the PowerShell script

Next we set up a classic bat-file to make it possible to execute the PowerShell script from windows scheduler. Here is the contents of the bat-file:


@ECHO off
for /f "tokens=1" %%a in ('powershell.exe ""') do set WD=%%a
powershell.exe -Noninteractive -Noprofile -Command "&{<path_to_your_7zbackup_folder>\7zBackup.ps1 --type full --selection <full_path_to_your_selection_file> --destpath <path_to_your_backup_destination_folder> --logfile <path_to_your_7zbackup_logging_folder>\daily_backup_%WD%.txt}"


Basically what it does is that it runs the 7zBackup.ps1 script file telling it to take a full backup, use the settings from the selection file, put the zipped backup in the given destination folder and put the 7zBackup own logging files in given directory and give the logfile a timestamped name.

If you haven’t configured the script execution policy you may encounter this error message:

File 7zBackup.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see "get-help about_signing" for more details.

That means you need to set the execution policy to allow executing custom scripts. More information here.

Step 3: Schedule the backup process with Windows Scheduler

The last thing to do is to schedule the backup process on daily basis (or more often if you like). There are 5 tasks to set up there:

1. Run SaveDataAll() on the TM1 server to make sure that all the data is written to disk before the backup starts
2. Shutdown the TM1 server: NET STOP <your_tm1_server_service_name>
3. Execute the backup bat file (created in step 2)
4. Start the TM1 server again: NET START <your_tm1_server_service_name>
5. (OPTIONAL): Copy the newly created backup zip file from destination folder to your remote backup storage location.

Here we are! Happy backuping!

-GD