topic Re: No Index after Backup and Restore in Alfresco Forum

No Index after Backup and Restore

phillip_toone — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 02:00:36 GMT

I set up a development server to experiment with Alfresco Community Edition. Everything seems to be working well so I have begun experimenting with being able to backup and restore the system to another machine. This seems to work well with one exception, the files are not indexed after being rest

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

cesarista — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 09:09:45 GMT

Hi:

Depending on how you do backups, you should have a copy of the current SOLR indices, or at least you will be able to recover the daily backups of SOLR from $ALF_HOME/alf_data/solr4Backup

Check the following links for more information (some scripts and backup strategies are commented there):

Alfresco Backup and Disaster Recovery White Paper

GitHub - toniblyx/alfrescodevcon2018: Slide deck for my talk about Alfresco Backup and DR (and HA architectures)

Regards.

--C.

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

mehe — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 10:53:01 GMT

Do you mean that all files aren't indexed (no index/search at all) or only files created after the restore? Are you running on Linux or Windows?

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

phillip_toone — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:16:17 GMT

After the backup is complete the files are all restored properly except that the search features fails to find any files on the system that match the search criteria. New files added to the system after the restore are searchable but not the old files that have been restored. Also, I just found out this morning that if I move the restored files from one folder to another they become searchable. I'm going to post the backup and restore instructions I have created for myself.

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

phillip_toone — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:18:27 GMT

Here is the backup instruction I have created for myself:

Stop the Alfresco Community Edition server

cd /opt/alfresco-community/ sudo ./alfresco.sh stop

Export the database to alf_data

sudo ./alfresco.sh start postgresql
sudo su
postgresql/bin/pg_dump -U alfresco -F t -b alfresco > alf_data/postgres.dump.tar
exit
sudo ./alfresco.sh stop

Copy the configuration directory to alf_data

sudo cp -r tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension alf_data

Back up alf_data

sudo rsync -a alf_data/ /path/to/backup/directory

Start the Alfresco Community Edition server

sudo ./alfresco.sh start

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

phillip_toone — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:22:27 GMT

And here are the restore instruction I have written for myself:
Install a compatible Alfresco Community Edition server and make sure the new server is not running.

cd /opt/alfresco-community/
sudo ./alfresco.sh stop

Restore the archive to alf_data

sudo rsync -a /path/to/backup/directory/ alf_data/

Restore the configuration directory

sudo cp -r alf_data/extension tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco

Restore the database

sudo ./alfresco.sh start postgresql
sudo su - postgres
/opt/alfresco-community/postgresql/bin/psql
drop database alfresco;
create database alfresco with owner alfresco;
\q
/opt/alfresco-community/postgresql/bin/pg_restore -d alfresco < /opt/alfresco-community/alf_data/postgres.dump.tar
exit

Start the Alfresco Community Edition server

sudo ./alfresco.sh start

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

mehe — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:38:59 GMT

...did you stop alfresco, Solr and DB (source side) before backing up?

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

cesarista — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:43:39 GMT

Hi:

Do you have some hardlinks under alf_data ?

Regards.

--C.

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

mehe — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:47:34 GMT

if not, and it's no problem to reindex all data: stop your "clone", delete the index data dirs () under ...alf_data/solr4/index

or remove the index data und copy/move a snapshot form ...alf_data/solr4Backup to your index data dirs.

As in: Restoring Solr 4 indexes | Alfresco Documentation

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

mehe — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 14:15:03 GMT

Just a dumb question (yes, I have seen rsync -a 😞 after restoring to the new machine. Is the alfresco user the same as on the source instance (name, UID, GID)? Ownership and accessrights are ok?

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

phillip_toone — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 14:30:15 GMT

Yes, as far as I can tell all of the owner and group information is preserved is the -a option. When I "ls -la" the alf_data directory, for example, everything belongs to the root user and group except the postgresql directory that is owned by postgres but in the root group.

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

mehe — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 15:07:54 GMT

..ah.. you run alfresco as root user - ok, there should be no problem with the access rights then.

It seems that your Solr didn't pick up your index files right. Can you see something in catalina.out on startup?

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

phillip_toone — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:00:40 GMT

I used

find . -iname "*catalina.out*"

to find the location of this file and

less ./tomcat/logs/catalina.out

to view the file. It is a pretty big file with a lot of information. Is there something I should use grep to look for?

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

mehe — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 17:11:20 GMT

grep -i solr ./tomcat/logs/catalina.out

there is also a solr.log in . or ./tomcat/logs

Look for exceptions.

Examine your alfresco and Solr startup using tail -f LOGFILE or less LOGFILE (and press F to follow the output).

There must be an exception with your index files.

If your repository has only a few documents, stop alfresco/solr and delete and rebuild the index data:

Performing a full reindex with Solr | Alfresco Documentation

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

douglascrp — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 18:25:30 GMT

You should take care with the way you restored the extension folder, as there are files in there, like share-custom-config.xml and alfresco-global.properties that have adresses/hostnames/IPs in them, if you blindly copy them, you can make your restored server to connect into the original one.

For thoses cases, you better to recover the content, avoiding this kind of problem.

Re: No Index after Backup and Restore

cesarista — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 21:54:01 GMT

To mitigate problems with these properties dependant of your environment, you may include them in your startup scripts as part of JAVA_OPTS (ex. -Dalfresco.host=xxx). And so the essential config under shared (at least for alfresco-global.properties) is the same for every environment and so, in a backup env too.

Regards.

--C.