• Article Type: General
• Product: SFX
• Product Version: 3

Description:
Please advise what the potential impacts of a restore of SFX from a full backup might be and cautions, warnings of which we should be aware.

Resolution:
When restoring from backup, there are a few things to keep in mind in general:

1. The SFX licenses are usually specific to one IP address. Thus if the machine being restored to has a different IP address than the machine for which the backups were made, then the restored SFX will likely complain about an invalid license and will not be functional. Ex Libris can create licenses for multiple IP addresses, so if the customer has a specific pair of IP addresses (i.e. one for the production machine and one for the secondary server that might be used to restore to if the production server were to fail suddenly), then we can provide licenses which will work on both machines. This would avoid the "invalid license" problem after restoring the production server files to the secondary server. Alternatively, the institution may have a plan to change the IP address of the secondary server so it is the same as the production server's. This would also avoid the "invalid license" problem.

2. Some target services have U/P (User Parameter) values that sometimes are filled in with the server's IP address. This would create problems for the associated target if these were restored to a server with a different IP address or hostname. The SFX installation as a whole will still be functional, however these particular target services wouldn’t work.

3. If the customer uses the backup-no-downtime script provided with SFX, they should realize that full restoration is a two step process. The first step is to unpack the single tar file that was created by the backup process. This restores all the files, but it doesn't restore the databases to immediate working order. Instead it results in a tar file for each database's set of tables to be in a dump directory (usually in tmp/dumpdir/, unless the customer has changed the default). In order to get the databases back in working order, these tar files need to be unpacked into the mysql data directory. The SFX SysAdmin Guide describes this in section 3.4.