We all know that since SAP upgraded BO to 4.x, the backup and restore process has been a difficult job. BO admins know what I am talking about. The import/export wizard that was available in version 3.0 is gone, rather a web-based LCM tool is integrated. The problem with this is that it is not dependable for backing up and restoring large files. There are two possibilities to create a backup: using the web interface tool and using a command line tool. The funny thing is, if the back up is taken using the web interface, it can only be restored using the web interface again and still requires the backup job to be available. The same story for command line.

In our company, we split the backup in to 3 different jobs.

1. Universes, connections, users, groups and profiles using the web interface tool.
2. Personal folders using web interface.
3. All the folders (this is huge in size) using the command line.

We tested the procedures to back up and restore using small size of files and that worked fine and we never tried to recover the whole file.

Recently, a guy has deleted a very important folder in their department by mistake and everybody started panicking. He immediately called for help. Now comes the real challenge :). Oh, did I also mention that selective restore is not possible in BO 4? It is unthinkable that you can only restore the whole backup. We cannot do that on production system because the other users will be affected. Fortunately, I kind of foresee the problem and have asked a sandbox server. It was a hassle to get the server (took about 6 months) and my manager interfered and we got it. So, i installed BO on the sandbox server and we use it to test new patches and service packs. So, for this problem to recover our lost folder, I tried to restore back up #3 (see above) to the sandbox server hoping that I will use promotion management to take the folder to production after restore. However, when the restore is finished, the folder I want is not there. Apparently, it seems the back up is not complete. In the mean time, these people who use the folder are calling and asking me the status. This is getting serious. We cannot afford loosing this folder. It contains important reports and people (including myself) have worked hard to get those reports in place. So,time to think!

Finally, I decided to go for a complete restore. I followed the following steps.

1. I took the Filestore backup of the production system and copied it to the Sandbox system with a different name.
2. I took the CMS dabase backup of the production system and restored it to the sandbox system with a different name.
3. I stopped tomcat and SIA on the sandbox.
4. I renamed the existing Filestore to a different name and renamed the file of #1 to Filestore.
5. Then I created a new node (SIA), this is important, and pointed it to the new database restored. A lot of attention is needed here. The SIA has to be created with default servers and the access key used when the production system was configured has to be supplied.
6. Then started tomcat and SIA.
7. When everything started, I logged to CMC of the sandbox systems and checked everything. It looked fine. I created a job and promoted the folder needed to production and the reports run as normal. Everybody was happy and it was a nice excercise for me as well.