How To... Prepare an ADMS Console Backup to send to Autodesk or a Reseller for Analysis

Frequently in Support, to be able to see and reproduce a problem, we might need to ask for a copy of the ADMS Console backup. The main problem with this is that the Filestore can be enormous, making it impractical to upload to an FTP site. To see a problem, we might not even need the Filestore. Furthermore, the Filestore will contain proprietary and sensitive data that you may not wish to distribute outside your organisation. There will be circumstances where the Filestore IS needed as well, but this is much rarer.

So, to send your backup to Autodesk or your Reseller, follow the following steps:-

Create a backup using the ADMS Console (Make sure you untick the "Backup Standard Content Center Libraries" option to reduce Backup size). This creates a folder with this format  "VaultBackup_YYYY_MM_DD_HH_MM_SS_PM"

This folder contains the following components

• "databases" (folder)
• "FileStores" (folder),
• •  Containing "Vault" folders
  • • 000 (folder)
    • FileStoreInfo.fsg (file)
• "BackupContents.xml" (file)
• "BackupHistory.txt" (file)

Copy everything EXCEPT the "000 (folder)" to a new folder.

• "databases" (folder)
• "FileStores" (folder)
• • Containing "Vault" folders 
  •  
    • FileStoreInfo.fsg (file) 
• "BackupContents.xml" (file)
• "BackupHistory.txt" (file)

Graphically, this can be represented as follows

This DOS script will copy all the necessary information required to restore a backup, without the filestore

 

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Set SOURCE=C:\Users\rankinr\Desktop\VaultBackup_2016_06_29_09_27_46
Set DESTINATION=C:\tmp\VaultBackup
mkdir %DESTINATION%\Filestores
XCOPY %SOURCE%\*.* %DESTINATION%
XCOPY %SOURCE%\databases\* %DESTINATION%\databases

EXIT
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If it not obvious, you need to replace the text in bold red with the actual path to the backup

Once the copy is complete, compress the folder in the ZIP or RAR format and upload it to you FTP site or a cloud storage service of your choosing and grant access to the support specialist you are working with.

Even without the Filestore the zip file can still easily be several GB big. Therefore, we recommend that you do not use Windows Explorer to upload the files to the FTP but a more robust free FTP client such as Filezilla

Comments

[Nursing cover]

the File store will contain proprietary and sensitive data that you may not wish to distribute outside your organization.

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