How can I restore reports which were overwritten by import ?

[hawaii_desperado]

Our Cognos administrator exported some reports from our dev environment and imported them into production overwritting some local changes which had been made.

We don't know all the changes that were made over time so we would like to restore our reports prior to the import.

We have cognos configured with the three tier design implementation having three machines   Application Tier---Gateway---Content Manager (oracle database)

Can we just restore the content manager database using the backup for the day prior to the change?    We are not 100% sure where the reports are actually stored.

Our administrator is new to Cognos so we are learning as we go.  Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ron

[MFGF]

Our Cognos administrator exported some reports from our dev environment and imported them into production overwritting some local changes which had been made.

We don't know all the changes that were made over time so we would like to restore our reports prior to the import.

We have cognos configured with the three tier design implementation having three machines   Application Tier---Gateway---Content Manager (oracle database)

Can we just restore the content manager database using the backup for the day prior to the change?    We are not 100% sure where the reports are actually stored.

Our administrator is new to Cognos so we are learning as we go.  Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ron

If you have a viable backup of the content store then yes - you can restore it. I would recommend that you perhaps restore it to a different database if possible, and temporarily configure your Cognos instance to point to this as its content store. Once this has been done, create a deployment export for the reports in question. Then reconfigure Cognos to use your "normal" content store and restore the deployment into this.

Cheers!

MF.

[simon.hodgkiss]

Hi,

if it's an import activity that's been done in the past it may be worth checking if an old deployment archive file was moved, renamed or deleted (so maybe still in the trash) and look into the possibility of re-importing that n-1 version.  However, it sounds like you've got a situation where users are making changes in the production environment and not necessarily making sure that those changes are also in Dev, so I guess it's still possible that there were changes made in between the 'n-1' import of content and latest 'n' import.

Based on that, it does sound like the restoration of the backup of the previous day's Content Store is your best alternative. 

Once things are back to normal, and if it's an option in your setup, if I was your admin I'd be asking to make the following basic changes in the near future to avoid a repeat:
(1) Restrict write access for end users completely, or as much as possible, in production. 
(2) Ensure that any creation or editing of report specs is done in a development environment only.
(3) Amend the content deployment process to take an export from Prod of any existing content about to be to replaced prior to an import
(4) Provide test environments between Authoring and Production envrionment for users to signoff changes before they are moved into production.

I know that authors are sometimes reluctant to lose their write access in Prod, but if the content is important then it should be protected.

All the best,

Simon