Salvaging a damaged 3.1(3) system

[richard.britton]

Hey all,

Is there any way to "salvage" call handlers and other settings from a damaged Unity 3.1(3) installation? A company we're working with recently tried to upgrade a 3.1(1) system to 3.1(3), but there were errors during the upgrade and now Unity works but you can't make any changes to the system. There is no good backup available, but the system is running.

The DiRT utility specifically states that it is not designed for this purpose, and the Import/Export tool only works with exporting from a 2.4 system INTO a 3.1x system.

So does anyone know of a way to try saving information "manually"? Any recommendations?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

- Rich

[lindborg]

If Unity is running you can try DiRT... I added that text to the help file since I had several sites try to "back up" systems that wouldn't even start they were so damaged. It might be worth a try with DiRT in this case since Unity is up and flying and the backup will be allowed.

If the damage to the system is in SQL, however, it'll simply be carted over to the new system. It's hard to say if this will work or not without more information about what's wrong with the system... but if you do a backup and then install a clean version of 3.1(3) (be sure to do a full uninstall of the current system) you might get lucky.

there's no good "manual" way to backup Unity components in a situation like this. Obiously your messages are in Exchange and those can be preserved... you can get your greetings and voice names for audio text applications out of the \commserver\streamfiles\ directory (they're just WAV files that are named in a way that makes it pretty easy to figure out which handler they go with). But beyond that, there's no much you can save here if DiRT doesn't work out.

[richard.britton]

Thanks for the quick response :^) OK then, a few more questions.

In this setup, Unity is using a pre-existing Exchange 5.5 server and the Unity server isn't running exchange. So if we want to try backing up, uninstalling and reinstalling Unity, and restoring - do we need to leave the Exchange 5.5 Unity elements during the uninstall so that it works with the restored configuration? Or would we need to remove everything including the Exchange elements before we can reinstall?

Also, would we need to re-do the Callmanager integration if we use the same IP address and machine name for the Unity server?

[lindborg]

You want to do a full uninstall of Unity which includes all the objects (locations objects, public distribution lists, example admin, example subscriber, unity messaging system account). The uninstall does all the property removal on subscribers, local file deletions, registry clean out etc... but does not remove these objects. A big dialog listing which objects/folders you need to delete is provided at the end of uninstall.

The DiRT restore wants a clean new Unity system up and flying, already connected to a call manager and all that. It leaves all those settings alone during the restore... it doesn't matter if the new Unity server is installed on or off box with Exchange or with 55 or 2K... the restore leaves all that alone and just restores our objects, files and hooks up to the mail users in the directory. Check out the help file for DiRT and review the online training videos on AnswerMonkey.net here:

http://www.answermonkey.net/App_DisasterRecoveryTools.htm