A recurring topic were a lot of SAP/OT maintenance team struggle is what to do with the Archive Server when performing a SAP system refresh. Let’s be honest: How many of you had the same issue? I had it couple of times in the last months… This happens because it is not really clear how to do an Archive Server system refresh. It is not as easy as a SAP system refresh. It implies more work and task to be performed so at the end the Archive Server ends up as it was before. No system refresh for Archive Server. The problem? You will have tons of problems with your new QAS environment when you try to check any SAP business objects that have attached files on them.
A few months ago one of my readers wrote me about this topic (thank you Salim). I thought it was a great question so the next step was writing an entry about it. Lets take a look!
Some of you would already read my previous entry about OpenText Archive Server. If you didn’t read them I would recommend starting with this one:
OpenText 101: Journey to the Centre of Archive Server
Over there I explained how the Archive Server files are mapped with SAP Business Objects:
So basically each Business Objects in SAP have a document ID that points to the file in the Archive Server. For example, when you attach a file on a purchase order in ME23N transaction the SAP system creates the document ID that is then passed to the Archive Server so both the file in SAP and the Archive Server have the same reference. This document ID is kind of unique within the system and the combination of the Business Object and document ID makes everything works.
So, what happens when we perform a system refresh on the SAP system? As I said the document ID depends on the system that it was created. When you perform a system refresh in SAP you are restoring the database of the SAP system from PRD into DEV/QAS. In the SAP system the documents IDs will be the ones that we have in the PRD system after restoring the database. The problem is that the document IDs in the SAP system doesn’t link the document IDs in the Archive Server. It will happen this when you’ll try to open a document in the QAS system:
This will happen with all the documents that were created before the system refresh date. Of course if you attach new documents in the SAP system you will be able to download and see them.
I already said it before: I’m not a big fan of the OpenText Knowledge Center. You won’t find a lot if you try to find any document related to this kind of operation. Basically there is no official document about how to perform an Archive Server system refresh. If you don’t believe me you can do the test. Go to the OpenText Knowledge Center and search “Archive Server System Refresh”. 1361 results and zero results related with the topic.
You can also open a support case to OpenText and if you are lucky they will send you couple of guides that could be related. If you are not lucky they will tell you that the OpenText Consulting Team will perform the project for a lot of money. I’m a fan of OpenText Support but in this case they were not really helpful. Probably because someone inside the company saw the market opportunity in this area…
Don’t panic, there is always hope! After studying the issue in the past I came around with the following ideas:
There is no best option in this case. All the described options have their pros and cons. For example, if you don’t mind about storage and you want to copy all the documents I would choose the option A. If you don’t want to copy all the documents and just copy a few I would go for option B or C. In the last years I used options A and C mainly, the only times I used option B was for exporting documents from Archive Server in order to migrate them to Sharepoint.
I hope this post clarifies the possible ways to perform an Archive Server system refresh. It is not a clear topic and it is difficult to find information about it on the Internet. As usual, please feel free if you have any question about the topic. Have fun with your Archive Servers!
I hope you all survived the log4j Apocalypse and Christmas, hopefully you had a great…
I know it is being a while since I posted the last time. So far…
UPDATE 11/25/2020 Adobe released a new patch that solves the issue a few days ago:…
Good news for you fanatics of SAP GUI! SAP will release SAP GUI 7.70 in…
Quick update since I don't have a lot of time lately. During my 2019 job…
It's been a while since the last time I wrote an entry in my blog.…
View Comments
Hi there! I stumbled upon this post looking into a way to extract archived documents from OpenText. We are retiring an older SAP system following a migration and want to simply extract the documents from the legacy OpenText archive. In your post you had the following: "I did something similar in the past when I create a program that used dsh for exporting documents in PDF file. If you are interested contact me and I will send you the script."
Would you mind sending me your script for extracting the documents? Not being an OpenText guru yet I'm struggling with the commands to get an extract to work.
Thanks in advance.
Hello,
I'm struggling with that export. I need to export out documents from Archive Server 10.x to another device. ISO image did not work because files are compressed and I cannot decompress those. So the option would be dsh script. Could you send me a sample of what you have made ?
Thanx
-B
Hi Mike,
Could you please share me the scripts to export and import the OT documents from PRD to Test?
Regards
Satish
Hi Satish,
Unfortunately I don't have access to the scripts anymore and I don't have a saved version in my drive, my apologies!