Backing up or restoring your configuration data

To ensure that data is secure in case of a system failure, regularly back up your configuration store. If your configuration store becomes corrupted, you can restore the configuration store to the state it was in when the backup was created.

About this task

To back up and restore your IBM® Content Collector configuration data, use the afuConfigStoreTool utility that is provided with the product. In addition, you can use this utility to free unused space in the Content Collector configuration store.

To include the Content Collector configuration store in a regularly scheduled corporate backup, define a scheduled task that runs on a Content Collector node and that uses the afuConfigStoreTool program to create a backup of the Content Collector configuration data in a directory that is located on the Content Collector node. Schedule this task to run in advance of the corporate backup. Configure the corporate backup to include the directory that contains the backup of the Content Collector configuration data.

By setting up the backup in this way, you make sure that the corporate backup picks up a coherent set of data. If you try to have the corporate backup software back up the Content Collector configuration data directly instead of backing up the files that are produced by the Content Collector backup utility, your backup can be corrupt. This will happen if IBM Content Collector is updating configuration information when the corporate backup software runs.

You run the afuConfigStoreTool program from a Windows command prompt. The utility is located in InstallDir/ctms, where InstallDir is the installation directory of IBM Content Collector.

You can run the utility on any node in the Content Collector cluster.

Procedure

To back up your configuration data, run the utility with the backup option:
```
afuConfigStoreTool backup [-free-unused-space] backup directory
```
The configuration data is copied to the specified directory. You do not need to stop the IBM Content Collector services to perform a backup. The backup files are written by the IBM Content Collector Configuration Store service not by the afuConfigStoreTool program. Therefore, the specified backup directory must be accessible by the service.
The contents of the backup directory are overwritten each time you create a new backup.

You can use the -free-unused-space option to free any unused space in the configuration store (if required) after creating a backup.
To restore your configuration data, run the utility with the restore option:
```
afuConfigStoreTool restore [-force ] [-remove-transaction-log]backup directory
```
The afuConfigStoreTool program first tries to connect to the IBM Content Collector Configuration Store service, so that it can identify all Content Collector nodes that share the configuration data. If the service is not running, the afuConfigStoreTool program starts it. After the backup utility identified all concerned Content Collector nodes, it stops all services that depend on the IBM Content Collector Configuration Store service, and then stops the IBM Content Collector Configuration Store service. When all these services have stopped, the afuConfigStoreTool program restores the backed up Content Collector configuration data. Subsequently, the utility restarts all services that it stopped previously.
If Configuration Manager is running while the afuConfigStoreTool program restores the configuration data, the Configuration Manager might report an error during this period that the IBM Content Collector Configuration Access service is not running.

To run the afuConfigStoreTool program with the restore option, you must be logged on as a user with the permissions to start and stop services on all Content Collector nodes, and the permission to write to the directory which the ALLUSERSPROFILE environment variable points to. The easiest way to ensure having the proper permissions is to log on as a user that is a local administrator on all Content Collector nodes.

You can use the -force option to work around some restore errors. For example, if the utility cannot connect to a node because maybe that node was decommissioned, you can use the -force option to work around that error.

Use the -remove-transaction-log option to delete the transaction log after the data was successfully restored.

Results

The utility writes activity and error messages to the console when it runs. If the backup or restore was successful, the utility exits with a return code of 0 (zero). Otherwise, it exits with a nonzero return code. The exit code is also written to the console.