PDMLink backup restore

[JMSCRA]

We have an issue where a person has done a "save and upload" in WF 5.0 and PDMLink 9.1. He then removed the item from his workspace a few days later. We do a nightly backup for disaster recovery purposes. He did not realize that removing items from his local workspace would also remove them from the server side as well. So this has generated questions for us:


1) What is the best way to retrieve this from the disaster recovery backup we have?

2) Is this a time consuming practice?

3) Is there a way to do a disaster recovery backup and then another sort of backup that may be easier to retrieve data loss such as the one mentioned above?

We do not have everyone check-in all work on any sort of a required daily or weekly type of basis. I believe this would alleviate tis type of issue but we also see this practice as one that could dramatically increase the size of our database possibly unnecessarily.

TIA,

John M. Scranton
Ultra Electronics - USSI
4868 E. Park 30 Dr.
Columbia City, IN 46725-8869
*Voice: 260.248.3576
*Fax; 260.248.3509

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[BenLoosli]

Can you even find the file with its encrypted name in your backup? The file would be in the cache folder.
If you do find it, download the file from common space into a workspace, then load the file from a normal (non-PTC-product controlled) folder into Pro/E and overwrite the workspace file of the same name.

Unless your designers throw away a lot of their work, checking in every day or at least weekly should not increase the data vault size significantly. Even if it does, you can remove unreferenced files to clean out the stale files.

[SteveVinyard]

You could have IT clone the current server to another server (not change the name but just spoof the hosts file to make the clone server think it's the production server) and then restore the previous nights backup to it. You'd probably just have to restore the DB.

There are a litany of server cloning softwares out there. Some for virtualization and other for hardware. Your IT dept should be familiar with these.

Once you do that, just spoof the host file on your user to make it think the clone servers IP address is really the production and then simply log in to the windchill server with Creo.

[MikeFoster]

Hi John,

The vault might be a good place to look. All uploaded files go into the vault and when a user deletes an object from Workspace it become an unreferenced file in the vault. Unless you regularly clean unreferenced files out of your vault then those files are still in there. Unfortunately filenames in the vault are just sequential numbers so finding them is difficult. Knowing the date and time they were uploaded will narrow your search.

Use a search tool to look in the file content for the file names - Hopefully the user remembers the names. If you open a vault file with a text editor you'll see that the info in the header of Pro/E files contains what you'll need to identify them. You probably could narrow it further by identifying vault files that are unreferenced and only looking at them.

Once you find them, copy them out and give them the correct filename and extension and then you can open them in Pro/E.

Example header of a part file:

#UGC:2 PART 1476 880 800 1 1 15 3100 2011080 000002cb \
#- VERS 0 0 \
#- HOST \
#- LINK \
#- DBID Intralink \
#- REVS 6,.X0.0+ \
#- RELL 11,Development \
#- UOBJ_ID 1351040561 737625510 591948846 \
#- MACH _Windows \
#- CMNM 012grappling_hook.prt \
#-END_OF_UGC_HEADER
#Pro/ENGINEER TM 5.0 (c) 2012 by Parametric Technology Corporation All Rights Reserved. M090

Mike Foster
ATK