Blog How Enterprise saved my weekend
4:30 Friday. The phone rings. I sigh, and answer the phone. Customer is on the other end of the line. He deleted and destroyed a bunch of files out of his Enterprise PDM vault. Looked like my weekend was in jeopardy.
The SOLIDWORKS knowledge base doesn’t give you many options for restoring your backed up data. Their advice can be summed up as follows:
- Restore your SQL database
- Restore your archive server …hope the restore points are pretty close to the same point in time else the two will be out of sync and you are pretty much out of luck
These steps can be laborious and if your archive server is very far out of sync with your database, you could spend months cleaning up the mess.
Then, like a dove from above, a SOLIDWORKS technical support gave me this little nugget of knowledge: “If you destroy a file, the file goes into a queue to be deleted but it is not really deleted until the cleaner service runs (typically 3 a.m.)”
This means that if the cleaner service has not yet run, all you need to do is roll back the database to a point before the bad thing happened and your system will look exactly just like it did at that restore point! -Database and archive files! Deletes, destroys, moves, copies, all undone! (Renames are undone too; this might be an issue for CAD external references, watch out for those.)
Don’t look at this as a ticket to dance on the mine field, but it is a swell safety blanket!
So we had the users make a copy of the files they had modified during the day to a safe location outside of the vault, rolled back the database and we were done! 5:30 – Engineering Data Specialist Man saves the weekend!