Migrating Leopard Wiki Server to Another Server

Mar 04

Migrating Leopard Wiki Server to Another Server

Posted in: Mac OS X Server by Damien Barrett Add comments

Today, we had a catastrophic data failure on our Wiki server, hosted on a Mac OS X Server. We had two backups, a Carbon Copy Clone from over a year ago, and a Retrospect backup from a few weeks ago. Clearly, the CCC backup was pretty much unusable (ancient content), and so we pulled our newest Wiki content from the Retrospect backup, and suddenly hit a wall. I needed to slip the “new” content into a freshly-restored Leopard server. But how?

Unfortunately, Apple’s Leopard Server documentation doesn’t say much about migrating from one Wiki server to another, but it turns out that it’s not such a difficult process. I found this Apple Discussion post that helped me to understand the process for restoring the content into a newly-rebuilt Leopard Server OS. Here are my notes from doing this:

Reinstall Leopard Server OS. Rebuild Users & Groups, rejoin to ODM, if necessary.
Pull Wiki content from Retrospect backup.
Turn off Web services, if you haven’t already done so.
Move the restored content into /Library/Collaboration
chown -R _teamsserver:_teamsserver /Library/Collaboration
Rename index.db to index.bak on each workgroup/wiki. Each index.db will be rebuilt when you restart the Web services.
Turn web services back on. Verify that index.db is rebuilt for each workgroup/wiki
Load your wiki in web browser and voila!, all your content is back.

And that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this was to restore a wiki from backup. Migrating a wiki from one server to another would use this same process.

Note: Retrospect doesn’t honor perimssions during a restore process, which necessitated step number 5 above. Normally, you’d just be able to tar or zip your content and cp or ditto it from one location to another, which would preserve your permissions.