Good old Archiver

Archiver is one of the oldest utility/component that is available in the Content Server.

The use cases that you can implement are plenty, and its quite a handy tool, if you know how to make use of it. Based on our recent experiences, following are the few important ones that you can implement.

1) Migrate custom tables and data

Using Archiver, you can migrate all custom tables and relevant data in those tables. The process involves creating the archive at source server by “Export”ing the configured tables data, copy the archived folder from CS_HOME/cs/archives folder to the destinations’ CS_HOME/cs/archives folder. Once copied, you need to copy the 2 lines (aArchiveName/aArchiveDescription) from collections.hda from source and copy those 2 lines to destination’s collection.hda. “Import” the archive in the destination server’s Admin Applet for Archiver.

Make sure you have selected table data only, else it creates archive for all contents, without asking 🙂

2) Migrate contents

Process involved is same as above, except, instead of configuring the table data, configure the content data.
Export, Copy, Import.

3) Delete contents

Same process as “Migrate”, only when executing the Export, select to “delete” the revisions from source server.
If required, you can move the generated batch folder to a separate storage,which can be pulled up if the deleted contents needs to be retrieved.

4) Update content metadata in bulk

Process is same , Export from source, Copy the archive to destination, but while Importing, you need to configure the Import Maps section.
 
5) Automate replication of contents between 2 servers

This is a bit tricky with both source and destinations need to be in sync with each other.
Might write more on this in another blog entry.