A Solution to Essbase Security File Backups

Essbase does its best to be friendly to us system admin types, but sometimes I just want to scratch my head in bewilderment.

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In 11.1.2.3 and later, Essbase performs a backup of the Essbase.sec file every 300 seconds and retains a default of two backups. This means that at any given time, you have two backups of the Essbase security file that are at most 10 minutes old.

In my experience, corruption to the Essbase security file is not identified within a 10-minute period, so as a matter of habit, I set the follow in the Essbase configuration file (essbase.cfg):

NUMBEROFSECFILEBACKUPS 10

SECFILEBACKUPINTERVAL 8640

The interval is in seconds. This ensures that at any given time, I have 10 backups spanning across a 24-hour period. I will determine the Essbase security file is corrupted easily within a few hours of symptoms occurring and can roll it back several hours if necessary.