Recovering documents

Documents can be recovered from a vault that is unavailable by executing some or all of a recovery log created by the Create Recovery Log Wizard. Executing a recovery log exports the latest revisions of documents or renditions from their streams folders to a location of your choice outside the vault. The documents can then be used normally until they can be replaced in the vault.

Before you begin

The following task describes how to recover document files that exist in the stream folders where they were managed by Meridian Enterprise. To recover files from stream folders copied to backup media, they must first be restored to disk in the original location and then this task must be used to recover the document files to another location with their original file names.

To recover all of the document files in an entire vault:

1. Locate and run the most recent full recovery log file. If incremental recovery log files also exist, run each file in the order in which they were created.

To recover individual document files from a vault:

1. Determine which recovery log file contains information about the files you want to recover. Compare the dates of the recovery log files with the date that the files were added to the vault (if known). If the files are known to exist in the vault prior to the earliest recovery log file, choose that recovery log file. Otherwise, choose the first recovery log file that was created after the files were added to the vault. If the dates that the files were added to the vault are unknown, begin with the earliest recovery log file and repeat this procedure with each recovery log file until the files are successfully recovered.

Note    If the files that you want to recover were added to the vault after the last recovery log was created, the files cannot be recovered until the vault is operational again.

2. On the Meridian application server, open a command-line window.
3. Make the folder containing the Meridian executables the current folder. By default, they are located in the folder C:\Program Files\AutoManager Meridian\Program.
4. Create an environment variable named RECOVERDIR and set it to the folder name where you want the files recovered, as in the following example:
   

Set RECOVERDIR=C:\Temp

Leave the command-line window open.

5. On the Meridian application server, open the recovery log file in a text editor.
6. Search the file for the file name of the first document that you want to recover (for example, B9823 Specification.doc). You should find a line in the recovery log file similar to the following example:

AMRecover %recoverdir% "\\?\C:\BC-Meridian Vaults\Demo\Mechanical\8FA0\546EE97A\40A311D6\7295C800\CONT.3D2" "\*" "\Projects\2002\Universal Joint\0564-02-0001\B9823 Specification.doc

Note    The stream file names of renditions are REND instead of CONT. The file names of recovered renditions have the text Rendition appended to them, for example, B9823 Specification.doc.Rendition. The format of the recovered rendition file is the same as when the rendition was created (for example, Adobe PDF) even though this is not reflected in the file name or extension.

7. Copy the entire line to the Clipboard.
8. Paste the copied line at the command prompt.
9. Run the command. The stream file is recovered to the folder name specified by the RECOVERDIR environment variable. The vault path of the file is re-created in this folder. If the document was in a workflow in the vault at the time that the recovery log was created, the vault path that is created begins with a folder named the same as the user ID of the user to whom the document was assigned.
10. Repeat steps 6 through 9 for each file you want to recover.