“There’s data that’s been backed up and data that’s not been lost……. yet.”
I was eating porridge this morning which eminded me of my 9th birthday ‘day out with friends’. My mother was driving. Now picture this: we passed by a motorcyclist led on the pavement with the top of his head missing. He managed to slice the top clean off. I’m no more a pathologist today as I was at 9 but felt sure the fella was dead and I knew that’s what the connection with porridge is – anyone who has seen a brain go splat has seen porridge.
If a safety helmet costs £25 and you don’t fall off your bike was it money well spent or was it wasted? If you ride a bike every day can you honestly say you will never fall or be pushed and never wreck your head and spend a week or more in a medically induced coma? You might not intend to fall off or expect to be pushed but accidents happen. There are only 4 reasons I can think of not to have object level recovery installed in your docbase:
1. Your docbase is enabled with some sort of freaky application that prevents it.
2. You spent all your money on Documentum products and your department is flat broke.
3. You completely underestimate or don’t know how hard it is for a dba to ‘partially’ restore a docbase or bits of it.
4. You have low value data that doesn’t change much and very generous downtime allowances.
A continually growing number of companies have Documentum Repositories and probably their DR plan is a tried and tested feature of that system. Except of course when a bit drops off, i.e. a disk set fails carrying a chunk of docbase or a user deletes a folder full of folders and files from a docbase (that’s what we used to call a repository – and that was a joke). If a bit of docbase drops off then it’s probably quicker to roll back to yesterdays backup loosing a days work and having a downtime that leaves people with time on their hands to maintain their facebook entries while you rebuild the system.
During my time as a Documentum dba someone would come up with a complaint that they lost a file out of Documentum.
Recovering deleted documents from a repository can be 1) difficult or 2) near to (if not) impossible. Getting back a deleted folder structure will drive you insane and probably require the restoration of the repository database to a separate place for analysis (or worse, roll back the repository…. not usually an option). If there’s a chance of recovering a document’s content (because dm_clean and dm_filescan jobs have not run yet) then you have to know where to find it on the file system managed by the content server. As Documentum supports multiple content storage areas it’s usually not clean-cut. If the system has distributed content then there is an additional action to perform to get to that content back.
Basically, restoring content and metadata after an accident without the right tools can ruin the whole week for one or more people and be more costly that first thought.
It’s hard to measure the value of a tool until you REALLY, REALLY need it.
CYA have a tool-suite that aids recovery from disaster or simple deletions. It brings back the content, the metadata and all the dependencies (workflow, relations etc).
Today they launch a CYA Recycle bin.
Where a layer of complexity is a bonus
Malfeasance is a word I learned today in a Webinar and I looked on Wikipedia for an explanation. The analogy was made that if a catering company accepts a bribe to undercook food then this is malfeasance. My analogy is that if you work for the police and some offers a bribe to have their criminal record erased then that amounts to the same thing. CYA makes it harder for evidence to be covered up or lost – moreso with the SmartRecovery product but the recycle bin can lend itself to this area also. This is always good news for pharmaceuticals with submissions that require FDA approval. CYA is compliant in the pharma vertical – many pharma’s have CYA and my experience with the product is positive. (CYA also provide excellent technical support).
I think probably many of us Documentum dudes have written such a tool in the past but to make a fully operational recycle bin isn’t just a day’s coding. There are a lot of dependencies when deleting/restoring stuff – not just the document, consideration has to be given to workflows, users, acls, relations, renditions and so forth. Well, CYA have the experience from SmartRecovery and SmartReplicator to deliver such a product and, as a big CYA fan, I’m personally looking forward to seeing it in action.
