Coveo Knowledge Base – How to Article – CES4-060401-6
CES4-060401-6: How to Back Up and Restore an Index
The information in this technical note applies to:
Coveo Enterprise Search 4
This article describes how to back up and restore your index files.
A backup is an "insurance" copy. It should be made either for archiving purposes or for safeguarding valuable files from loss, should the active copy be damaged or destroyed.
It is good practice to back up your index once in a while, especially if it contains a lot of documents that don’t change frequently. On the other hand, if you rebuild your sources every day, there’s no real benefit in making a backup copy of all of the files since rebuilding implies that the documents will be deleted and re-indexed anyway. Nonetheless, making a copy of the configuration files is highly recommended. These files' default location is the Config folder under Coveo Enterprise Search main folder: C:\CES4.
You can use the system schedules to set your index to be set to Read-only mode at specific periods or intervals in order to make an unattended backup copy of the files without having to stop the index. Users will still be able to perform queries while the backup operation is in progress.
First, the index must be in Read-only mode or the Coveo Enterprise Search service must be stopped; you cannot back up the index files while it is indexing. It is recommended to back up the index while in read-only mode so that users can still make queries. Do not attempt to back up the index files when it is not in read-only mode for some of the files locked by Coveo Enterprise Search won’t be copied. The restore procedure may then result in a corrupted index.
To back up the index, copy all files and subfolders of the CES4 folder (for example: C:\CES4\) to a convenient backup location, except the Temp subfolder since it contains temporary files that are locked by Coveo Enterprise Search. In read-only mode, the files from the Temp subfolder are used by the index as a temporary cache for user queries and are not needed to perform the backup copy.
To restore the index files, the Coveo Enterprise Search service must be stopped. You cannot restore a backup copy while indexing or while in read-only mode as that might result in a corrupted index.
First, prior to restoring an index, you MUST delete the data already there. Otherwise, transactions generated by the current index will remain as you copy the index files back. The indexer will try to apply these transactions at a later stage, and that can result in a corrupted index. Thus, simply delete the files and folders under CES4.
Once this is done, restore the backup files into CES4\. Once these steps are done, restart Coveo Enterprise Search service. It will restart using the restored backup copy.
A backup scenario is to backup the configuration files only. Restoring a configuration-only backup requires to rebuild all the sources after the restore. The preparatory procedure for backing up configuration files is the same as for the index: the index must be in read-only mode or the service must be stopped.
The configuration files are located in the Config folder. To back them up, simply copy them to a different location. To restore them, use the procedure for restoring an index.
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Last Reviewed |
2006/04/01 |
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Keywords |
Back Up, Restore |