My question is about how to restore a safe and its data after a hard drive crash or data erasure.
At the company where I work, we use the Enterprise PDM solution to manage our SolidWorks data. The vault is located on a specific PC that acts as a data server. The hard drive containing the vault is backed up regularly, automatically, to another server in another office.
My boss asked me a question that I couldn't answer with certainty but for which I'm sure you can enlighten me!
- What would happen if the hard drive of the trunk were to "crash"? Can we just take the backup hard drive and mount it in the vault server?
- If SolidWorks files were accidentally deleted, could they just be recovered with a simple USB stick and put them back in the vault?
- Are the files "cripted" in any way?
In short, these are the kinds of questions that a non-computer scientist like me has a hard time answering.
My research and observations lead me to believe that:
- The SolidWorks files are saved in the vault with a hexadecimal "encoding" that does not allow me to identify, and consequently to copy/paste particular files that would have disappeared from the server.
- The SQL database that runs behind Enterprise PDM would probably not support the pure and hard disk swap in case of a crash.
Can you confirm (or not...) my first ideas and share your respective expertise so that I can correctly answer my boss?
That said, as I said in my original message, I'm not a computer scientist and I don't have control over any physical architecture here anyway. The best I can do for the "clown" you are talking about will be to graft a red nose and big shoes to my waiter!! ;-)
Joking aside (I hope you didn't take it the wrong way...), I think I understand what you're telling me. I think there is already a RAID mount in the server PC containing the PDM trunk but that's not my question. More pragmatically, can I go to the backup PC in the boss's office tomorrow and recover solidworks files that could have been erased from the safe with a USB key?
If you don't have control over the physical architecture, it can be complicated.
The minimum is indeed that the server is in RAID1. In the event of a disk crash, the system continues to work and the failed disk can be replaced.
In case of a real deep crash, as Remrem said, after correcting the physical problem, we reject the save.
To recover a missing file, it is better to provide a recycle bin system at the EPDM level. Injecting a file back into the database will not make it available any more than it will no longer exist at the EPDM level. If the file was deleted without going through EPDM, there is a problem with the file access rules (the average user should not be able to do this).
As much as my sql database and my file vault are backed up via our management tools (we are on a fairly strong virtualized system), I am interested in knowing how to remount a crashed sql database or archive server.
If anyone has ever done the manipulation for the SQL server and/or archive server, I'm interested to know how it goes in real life.
Without having done it, I imagine that this kind of manipulation can become a problem very quickly (especially if there is a slight time desynchronization between the times of the SQL backups and archives)