Reinstall/Repair ??

[acommons]

Does anyone know if it is possible to run the install in repair mode? Basically put all the Alfresco components back the way they were after the initial install without touching any of the data that exists in the installation?

I've looked at the installer –help output and there does not seem to be anything helpfull there.

The reason I'm asking this is that I've hit a file upload issue that causes Alfresco to self mutilate and the user interface breaks. It seems to be terminal and the only way I can, at present, get a running Alfresco again is to reinstall. This would  not be such an issue if I could do that without losing everything!

Any suggestions?

cheers

[mrogers]

There's no way alfresco will "self mutilate", that's just lazy problem diagnois.   And it should never be neccessary to re-install.  

In addition you should learn to backup and restore alfresco, just like any other computer system.

[acommons]

I have been exploring Alfresco for a couple of days now.

An error occurs in an upload and it disables the Share web GUI - Alfresco is unable to find a component it needs any more and Tomcat crashes. The error survives a restart of Alfresco. It survives a reboot of the system and a restart of Alfresco. Required component still AWOL and Tomcat still falling over.

I certainly didn't go in there and hide anything. To me it looks like Alfresco did the hiding. I'll stick with self mutilation.

As a user I don't expect to have to go and rummage around the insides of the application to get it going again once I've got it configured. As a new user I'm rather alarmed that such things can happen.

Backup and restore is now right up there as something I need to figure out. It's priority has jumped ahead of exploring functionality. The documentation discusses database replication/backup but obviously there is more to it than that, I have to cater for arbitrary bits of the application going missing and at present I have no idea what parts of the file system, if any, need to be synchronized with the database. The online documentation is silent on this.

So, for example, can I do a fresh install and then backup the entire /opt/alfresco-3.4.d on disk structure then replicate my database and in the event of a failure (bits of the application going missing) restore the post install image and the current database? Or do I have to establish a quiet point for the database and the /opt/alfresco structure and grab the lot every time?

All advice appreciated. Alfresco looks very useful and I'd like to be able to make use of it without feeling like I'm playing Russian Roulette every time I click a button.

cheers

====== edit ======

I have now found some details on the wiki. I would suggest, given my experience with part of the tomcat installation getting messed up, that a post install backup is necessary and the restore from a cold backup should be revised to be:

(1) Original application post install
(2) dir.root
(3) database

cheers