Backing up the Visual Modeler

About this task

It is good practice to plan for the possibility of a catastrophic failure that renders the Visual Modeler machine unusable. In this eventuality, you need to be able to restore the Visual Modeler as rapidly as possible.

We suggest taking the following steps:

Procedure

  1. Replicate the servlet container: keep the installable for the exact release of the servlet container, together with any patches applied. Back up any changes to archive files, or startup scripts that might affect the order of class-loading for example. A copy of the JDK used to run the servlet container would also be useful.
  2. Back up the Visual Modeler itself: that is, create a WAR file of the running Visual Modeler application directory. This will capture any changes to system properties, business rules, as well as the XML model files, resource files (product images and so on) and other files (such as uploaded GIF files).
  3. Note that the Visual Modeler enables a fair amount of customization that can place files outside of the Visual Modeler Web application directory. If you take advantage of this capability, then you have to backup these directories too. In particular, a clustered installation of the Visual Modeler requires the creation of a shared location that will be external to the Web application directory on any particular machine.
  4. Take a snapshot of the database at regular intervals: verify that the Visual Modeler Knowledgebase can be restored from this backup.
  5. Make a copy of the dcmsKey.ser file and put this in a very safe place. Encrypted data will be unrecoverable if this file is lost. For customers with Release 9.0 or higher, this instruction needs to be modified depending on your choice of encryption scheme and key management policy.