Thursday, May 29, 2014

Universal Method of Restoring a Snapshot with Customization

Hi Everyone,

There were few questions recently from our support and customers on how to restore snapshots we sent to support centre. Well our customers may use customizations, with fields added to tables.

So this post is to shorten your support response turnaround.

Obviously if you make such a snapshot, it will be hard to restore on plain company. So what should be steps that always work. We have Source company and Destination. Source is at your customer premises. Destination is in our support centre in ... one of the European countries. So here are the steps:

0. Even before you started. Make sure 'A-ca' version on source and destination is the same. Literally.
1. Make a snapshot at source company. Full snapshot, with the customization, on the source company. Export it in a file. Keep it safe.
2. Export source company customization in a file. ZIP file of course. Assume you know how to export customizations in a file. Keep that file too. Please note 1 and 2 is not the same, you will get 2 (two) files at the end.
3. Now take files from 1 and 2  and send them to our support. Make sure they received right files (two files).
4. Now, assume we are support engineer. Create Empty company on newly created database. That is easy, just follow installation guide.
5. Take the file from 2. And upload customization on your empty company. Publish it. restart IIS.
6. Upload the snapshot file from 1. Restore it.
7. You enjoy.

Best Regards,

Sergey.

7 comments:

  1. Hi Sergey,

    if we have deleted a customization projects, the fields that have been added are not deleted and are still in the DB. This is doing an issue because we can't publish this old customization project, we don't have it anymore.

    Also, it's the same problem when we change version: we can't use snapshots taken in previous version.

    Is it possible to create a program that would be used in that kind of situation?

    I mean a program that would ask if we prefer to extend or cut the field in the snapshot or if we prefer to affect the DB and do the modification, to be able to use the snapshot?

    Thanks.

    Sebastien

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    Replies
    1. Hi Sebastien, you see, if you have used the project, that added fields to the DB, and then user entered data into these fields. You can't clean these data by a single click, removing the project. This is against Audit rules. Data MUST be preserverd and sitting in the DB. Therefore field will remain. No way.

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    2. And one more thing, always keep projects in a zip file, so when needed you can restore it and publish, so DB fields will be recreated on a plain DB.

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    3. Hi Sergey, ok, I understand. But is there something we can do if we want to use a snapshot taken with Acumatica version 3 into Acumatica version 4? Because there is the same problem as some fields or tables are modified / added / removed when we change version. Thanks.

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    4. As this task is one of a kind. You can do it this way. 1. Make ver.3 snapshot. 2. Restore it on environment with the same version 3. 3. Upgrade the environment to version 4. by wizard upgrade (site and DB). 4. Make snapshot of version 4. All the best.

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    5. Hi Sergey,

      I follow your steps, but there is an error when i import snapshot such as can not import data to APInvoice...

      Thanks,
      Y Ly

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    6. Hi Y Ly, most probably APInvoice at destination or sourse has different schema, please apply all the customizations first to destination before restoring a snapshot.

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