How to Export / Backup a stream and its component
We are using RTC 5.0.2. Is there a way to export or otherwise backup a stream and its component such that it could be imported into another project or into the same project as a different name?
Ideally, all history and permissions would be stored with the export or backup and restored on import.
The intent is to capture an export or backup at a point-in-time (of a Production release) so that the state of the stream prior to the release could be recovered in the event that RTC information is lost.
We are planning to create a baseline at this point-in-time to reference in RTC for normal usage.
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Thank you. We plan to use baselines as you suggest (we only have one component presently so we don't think we need to create snapshots). With only one component, is there another reason we should use snapshots?
Is there any functionality current or planned that would allow us to export a stream outside of RTC in a format that could be re-imported into RTC later? If something critical were to fail with RTC the baselines and snapshots would be of little use.
If you only are using one component, then baselines are all you need (no need for snapshots). For disaster recovery, you should make sure your system administrators are backing up the RTC database. If you want to have your own private backup mechanism, you can enable RTC SCM distributed delivery, and "deliver" the desired baselines to your own personal RTC repository (but that only tracks your SCM data ... not the work item data ... you should be able to count on your system backups and not have to do this kind of thing on your own).
Thanks. I agree with your comments about the need for good system backups. What we are looking for in addition to that is a way to be able to recover to a point-in-time to manually retrieve information (WI, source code, etc.) that may have been corrupted based on human error or possibly an unexpected or unlikely RTC failure.
We have been told that in order to recover our RTC system, the entire RTC environment would have to be recovered to a point-in-time (app server, database, all projects and data, etc.). That could cause rework in areas of the system where a data problem didn't occur.
Contrast this to if there was a capability to separately backup and import or restore source code or work item data independently, it might be possible to recover the specific data at issue without causing rework in other areas of the system.
Or if there was at least a way to restore the RTC system separately without overwriting the original system, individual data could be manually retrieved and fixed in the original system. We are told by our admins that it is very complex to restore a copy of the RTC system and duplicate servers, IPs, etc. would be needed.
Is there a way to restore the RTC system separately without overwriting the original system?
To provide guidance, we would need to know more information about the specific use case(s) you are interested in. For example, if the system has "failed" (disk crash, whatever), you need to restore the entire system from backup ... trying to piece together individual pieces is never going to be practical. If you just want to retrieve an earlier state of an object, then with versioned objects (files, directories), you can retrieve the appropriate baseline/snapshot. With work items, you can use the "history" view of the work item to see earlier states of that work item. But if you want to, for example, back up the state of every work item in a project area to some specified date, there is no direct support, but if you have a database backup for the desired date, you could restore that backup in a temp repository, export the desired work items, and import the result into the current repository.