topic Recovery possible without the database file??? in Alfresco Archive

Recovery possible without the database file???

ruud — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:11:29 GMT

Hello all,Recently i lost my database file. I now only have the contenstore and indexes left. Is it possible somehow to get my files/repository back or have i lost the data forever?Thanks in advance,Kind Regard,Ruud Perlet

Re: Recovery possible without the database file???

invantix — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:56:59 GMT

Wow how did you loose your database? If you did not back up your database you cannot rebuild the app. If you need to retrieve one, some, or all of the files it is possible (although difficult).

The files are stored in the afresco/alf_data/contentstore directory. Under there is a directory tree based on data and time added (year/month/day/hour/min) i.e 2008/6/29/12/4.

The files all have a .bin extension. the small 1k files are spaces and the larger files are documents. I was able to retrieve a file I knew was a PDF by rening the file from .bin.to .pdf. you can do the same for doc, ppt, xls…

Re: Recovery possible without the database file???

peterh_nl — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:26:50 GMT

@luis sala: ok, no database means no means of recovery at all.

A related question if have is the following: Does the same go for alf_data and db out of sync? Of course it throws some errors but it should be possible to start Alfresco and recover some or most of the files whilst missing partial references between database and file-system? This (database crash) is what happened to a customer of mine recently who had to restore a database-backup that was no more than a couple of hours out of sync with the file-store (yep: not backed-up simulaneously..) Is her data 'completely lost' or is a some option to force alfresco to start, thus giving the opportunity to recover some data and files from within the application. The customer started with a clean repository where files are searched on the fly by date and words in content but the original data is still all there.. :roll:

Any suggestions on this one, thought not completely on subject, would be highly appreciated!
Regards,
Peter

Re: Recovery possible without the database file???

cpotter — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:47:42 GMT

I'm sorry to say that you will be unable to recover if you lose either the DB or the "contentstore".

This seems to be a MAJOR design flaw. I can imagine that you can't recover without the contentstore (where the real data are), but without the database, I don't understand why there is not a disaster procedure

Christopher

Re: Recovery possible without the database file???

locolyric — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 05:16:08 GMT

hi , my server system were corrupted and unable to boot up. Is there any way we can extract the files out from the database using another pc beside the method above?

Re: Recovery possible without the database file???

rjohnson — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 10:36:04 GMT

If the database preceeds the content store then it should come up, you might have dificulty with the existing Lucene indexes pointing to data that nolonger exists so you should kill them and re-index or restore the Luncene indexes from an earlier backup and let it catch up. Also anything added to the content store after the point in time of the database restore is lost.

As to the "have content store - no database" issue, you are in a pickle. From what you say I can only assume you have never backed up alf_data at all (because if you had, unless you deliberately put the database somewhere else it will be on your backup). The files in the contentstore are all stored in their original format (i.e. a PDF is still a PDF) its just Alfresco that renames them, so you can read through the files, determine the type and then add the appropriate extension so you know "what" they were. I doubt that you can retrieve the original file name unless that is held in the document itself in some proprietry metadata (e.g. Adobe PDF and MS Word have their own document properties that would still be there).

Rule 1 Backup frequently
Rule 2 Test backup