Despite all precautions, it may happen that you want to recover from data loss or want to go back to an older state of the Bridge. In this case, you may want to load a backup of a previous state of the Bridge.

Taking a Bridge Backup

Depending on the operating system, a Bridge installation consists of the following components:

The operating system specific data and the program directory can be recovered by performing a Bridge installation of the very same version (see Loading a Bridge Backup below). Nevertheless, you can take a filesystem backup of these items.

Whereas, the Bridge data directory cannot be recovered from a Bridge installer and needs to be backup-ed from the filesystem. To do so, you can use any tool of your choice. You do not need to shutdown services or the Bridge while you are taking the backup.
If the backup takes a big amount of disk space, you may leave out the following folders and files:

• general
  • <your Bridge data directory>/backup
    This folder contains previous versions of the repositories of your deployed services.
  • <your Bridge data directory>/servlets/logs
This folder contains additional Bridge logs.
• service
  • <your Bridge data directory>/bridge_<service name>/logs
<your Bridge data directory>/nodejs_<service name>/logs
<your Bridge data directory>/java_<service name>/logs
This folder contains the logfiles of the corresponding service.

  • <your Bridge data directory>/bridge_<service name>/tmp
<your Bridge data directory>/bridge_<service name>/trace.db*
Folder tmp contains trace information of the corresponding service, the trace.db files contain meta data about trace information of the corresponding service. If you exclude tmp from backup, you should also exclude the corresponding trace.db files.

The mentioned files may contain helpful information but are not necessary to recover and operate the services on the Bridge. Especially the logfiles may grow by the time and may lead to big backup files.

Loading a Bridge Backup

One Filesystem Backup

If you have backup-ed the complete Bridge installation with one filesystem backup, you can recover your Bridge installation as follows:

1. Stop your Bridge.
   Stop all running services, the proxy server (if necessary), and the Bridge system service.
2. Replay the filesystem backup of your Bridge files on top of the current installation.
3. Start your Bridge.
4. Start the services.
   All services that do not have flag Automatic restart set, need to be started manually.

Separate Data Backup

If you have backup-ed the Bridge data files separately with a dedicated filesystem backup, you can recover your Bridge installation as follows:

1. Stop your Bridge.
   Stop all running services, the proxy server (if necessary), and the Bridge system service.
2. Replay the filesystem backup of your Bridge data files on top of the current installation.
3. Re-run the Bridge installer of the target Bridge to recover the Bridge program files and operating system specific data.
   The installer has an option that allows you to directly start your Bridge automatically after installation.
4. Start the Bridge, if not already done with step 3.
5. Start the services.
   All services that do not have flag Automatic restart set, need to be started manually.