Total disaster recovery

[perom]

Hello to all,

ok, here is the case:
on one site there was total disaster - fire has ruined server room. What i managed to save are only parts of alfresco server configuration - since everything was on separate disks - alf data directory + alf lucene indexes are saved.

Unfortunately, all the rest has gone - including tapes where backups were created.

Is there a chance to try to make some recovery out of the data still intact? DB is missing, and that is the true, but all the data should be there.

If anybody have an idea, thanks in advance!

[mrogers]

Are you saying you have suffered a disaster or are you preparing for one?

[perom]

Nope, no false alarm, the disaster is a real one!

Tragically, one a small sites it is not possible to fulfill DR procedures according to lets say "best practices".

Accidentally, it happened that disks were in such setup on server, that two of them survived. I can reconstruct Os+Alfresco installation themself, I even
managed to find some old backup from several months ago, when I was last visiting that site, among my local files.

The question is did someone ever faced the same or similar situation? And of course, is there any chance to recover it?

BR

[mrogers]

Oh my.. :shock:

To restart Alfresco you need at minimum to recover your database and the content store.   
The database and the content store need to match, with the database being slightly earlier than the content store.

You can rebuild your alfresco installation and the configuration. The lucene indexes can be re-generated so that's not a problem.

There's this wiki page if you havn't seen it.
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Backup_and_Restore

If you have lost completely lost your database then you may be able to recover some of your content by hand and guesswork from the content store, but that will be a time consuming, error prone and difficult task.  Let's hope your small office did not have many documents.

[fjelinek]

Hi there,

I have a similar problem. I crashed my database, the backup does nor work (this was my problem, found the mistake of defect backup). But the content store still exists.

Is there any way to get the documents back from the content store? at least the last recent versions? If yes, could anyone put me in the right direction how to do this?

Thanks a lot
Frank

[mrogers]

Not really.  

You may be able to guess the content types for the contents of the documents in the content store.    But the meta-data lives in the database.   So you may be able to guess the mime type and create new meta data which will be a long and error-prone process.