Jonathan Haun (@jdh2n) of Decision First Technologies has published a great piece on backing up and restoring SAP BusinessObjects on his All Things BOBJ BI blog.
The essence of his post is that SAP BusinessObjects administrators don't generally give too much thought to backing up their deployment. Usually, they simply give a list of requirements to someone in IT and assume the job has been done to those specifications.
However, restoring an SAP BusinessObjects deployment may not be so straightforward, nor particularly timely. Should some object be accidentally deleted or become corrupted, your options are limited to:
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Full restore - replacing the entire deployment with the last known good backup.
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Temporary restore - restoring to a new location and using an import wizard to restore missing or corrupted objects to the production deployment.
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BIAR file restore - use Business Intelligence Archive files (BIARs) to archive and restore portions of the CMS db system and input/output FRS.
Jonathan rightly notes that all of these methods have issues, and the BIAR file method, which had become an easy-to-use favorite of administrators using XI 3.1, has become significantly less than friendly in early BI 4.0 deployments. Jonathan floats the Upgrade Management Tool as a limited workaround for BI 4.0 issues.
There is no replacement for performing regular backups of your SAP BusinessObjects deployment, but that's the easy part. When it comes to maintaining easily accessible archives, all of the methods listed by Jonathan are time-consuming and error-prone, and they look at archive, backup and restore as simply operational issues. What if you have regulatory concerns? What if you are migrating and need to archive instances that you are not migrating in an easily accessible and secure way?
APOS Storage Center offers a solution that complements an incremental SAP BusinessObjects backup strategy. It allows you to back up objects securely and selectively restore them in one simple operation. You can also archive instances in formats not dependent on data connections (e.g., PDF) to server as documents of record for compliance purposes.
Download the APOS Storage Center white paper, or watch the APOS Storage Center recorded webinar.
