How to back up a Community

Problem Description

Backups should be made of key communities so that they can be restored in case of system failure, unauthorized editing, accidental deletion, or accidental deletion of community content.

Solution with HCL Connections provided tools

HCL Connections does not provide such a functionality. If you have made regular Connections database backups, you can reset the entire Connections system to the last database backup and accept the loss of everything created /modified since the database backup. Otherwise, you will have to accept the loss of the community

Solution with Connections Administration Toolkit (CAT)

Export Back up:

Navigate to Content And Access – Communities. Use the filters to search for the Community you are interested in.

Select the community and hit Export. The community will be downloaded as a zip-file. Depending on the size of the community, this may take a while:

Import Backup:

To import a community backup, visit Content and Access – Communities and click the button Import. If you have not already uploaded the community zip-file, you need to upload the backup zip-file in the following dialogue:

Once the backup zip-file has been uploaded, select it in the list and click Ok. If the exported community has subcommunities, you will get a choice of which community (the community itself including all subcommunities, or a subcommunity only) to import

Once the zip-file has been imported, you get the import dialogue where you have several configuration options

Name: Name of the imported community. The import will be created as a new community with this name.

Description: Description of the new community. The back-upped community’s description will be prefilled here.

Configure ‘Originally Posted By’: Not all original post dates and original creators can be retained while recreating the community. This option will add a configurable description of when, where, and who originally posted the content.

Visibility of community: Whether the import will be created as a restricted, moderated, or public community

Copy subcommunities: Use this checkbox to select whether to also import the subcommunities or not

Advanced settings for large communities: Since the CAT uses the REST API, these settings are important to prevent crashing either the CAT or the Connections servers. Maximum execution time tells how long CAT should keep copying before taking a pause so that other processes can run in the meantime. Wait between batches sets how long CAT pauses before restarting the execution. Delay after each REST request sets how long CAT waits after making a request from Connections so that Connection has time to manage the request before the next one comes in.

After clicking ‘Submit‘, a confirmation popup summarizes the changes and allows you to enter a comment. All changes, comments, and who made them, are logged by the CAT application.