Recovering My Server Catalogue After Crash

[Mardon]

My OS drive (C:)crashed and I am rebuilding it. I was running the official Build 994 ofDaminion and Daminion Server before the crash. My Server catalogue is located in the PostgreSQL folder (v9.2) that is located on drive G: which did notcrash. The PostgreSQL folder containsover 2GB of data. The PostgreSQL serveris not running presumably because the OS registery was lost when C: crashed.

 

Please tell me that I can get my Daminion Server catalogueback since all the data is still intact on drive G:. Can anyone tell me how to proceed? I tried doing a regular install of Daminion Server Build994 but it wants to install PostgreSQL in a new folder.

 

I cannot afford to lose my existing catalogue. Thanks. Mardon

 

[lintujuh]

Hi!

 

I can't give you detailed instructions, but I'd let Daminion install PostgreSQL in another directory. Then I'd start the PostgreSQL admin tool and connect your database in G: to the server. In the admin tool you can create a backup of your database and after that upload your backup into the new instance. It might be possessible that you can even do direct copy paste in the admin tool, but I'm not sure. Remember to shutdown the Daminion server connection to the database.

 

Juha

[rene]

Hey Mardon, that sounds like a pretty tough job. good luck with that! Sadly I can't give you any advice.

[Mardon]

Hi!

 

I can't give you detailed instructions, but I'd let Daminion install PostgreSQL in another directory. Then I'd start the PostgreSQL admin tool and connect your database in G: to the server. In the admin tool you can create a backup of your database and after that upload your backup into the new instance. It might be possessible that you can even do direct copy paste in the admin tool, but I'm not sure. Remember to shutdown the Daminion server connection to the database.

 

Juha

Thanks Juha, You and I were thinking along the same lines because I actually tried what you suggested. The PostgreSQL installation worked fine in a new directory but I was unable to establish a connection to the old database on G:. I've since decided to just load all my image files into a new catalog. I was reluctant to do that at first because I had so much trouble creating the original version of the catalog. But the original catalog was created with very early Daminion versions and it also involved converting severl tens of thousands of CR2 RAW files to DNG. For the new catalog all my files are already DNG with the metadata embedded. Using Daminon Server 3.0 I'm able to add those DNG files fairly quickly. It looks like it is going OK so far.

 

Thanks again for your idea. I'm also going to keep a CURRENT ISO image of Drive C:. I have one I used to do a restore but it was over a year old and didn't have Daminion included.

 

Mardon

 

 

 

[lintujuh]

Great, if you can recover your data without too much fuzz. I have also been using Daminion long time starting with very early version. When I switched from the standalone to the server version and recreated my catalog I unfortunately discovered that the catalogs were not equal. In the old versions there have been some bugs and at least I had images where there was more information in the database than in the image itself.

 

I became curios and did some googling. Simpliest thing seems to be to copy your old G:PGDATA (by default C:\ProgramData\PostgreSQL\Data) over the new installation (see link).

 

More detailed way to recover just one database will require modifying the internal tables of PostgreSQL. According to PostgreSQL documentation each database is stored in a subdirectory PGDATA\base\<oid>, where oid is the databases OID in the table pg_database(see link). The table pg_database is in Servers > PostgreSQL ... > Databases > postgres > Catalogs > PostgreSQL (pg_catalog) > Tables > pg_database. This table contains one row for each database. My guess would be to copy the right subdirectory from your old G:PGDATA\base into current PGDATA\base and then add with the admin tool one row (copying the other values from existing databases) into the pg_database table. I haven't tried this so this is without any guarantee and on your own risk! There can (will) be internal dependencies that are not taken into account.

[Uwe]

Hi Mardon,

 

I recommend to use symbolic links. That means, you use the default installation procedure. Then you create the link for folders that you want to have on another place. This is full supported by Windows. E.g. my system disc is a 120GB SSD and it becomes to small. But I have some other discs big enough to use them. I decided to save all the Daminion Thumbnails on a regular disc (the folder "c:\Users\user_name\AppData\Roaming\Daminion Software\Daminion\Temporary"). In my case about 10GB.

One advantage is: you are flexible to decide when do you want to "switch", e.g. as long as you have a small catalog you use the default folder and later you "move" it to another place without to change anything in the applications.

I use: http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

 

I have a default backup procedure of the system disc that runs every day at 19:00 (it takes about 15min in the background) - Acronis TrueImage, and I make a catalog backup every day, when I finish the day (

 

Regards, Uwe

[Murat]

Hi Mardon, did you able to recover your catalog?

 

Did you try to install the Daminion Server on a new disk (or a computer) and then replace the newly created PostgreSQL\Data folder with your a COPY of your PostgreSQL\Data folder from the G: drive? Don't forget to do a backup of your Data folder from G: drive to an external drive.

 

With early PostgreSQL versions (9.0) you also need to apply permissions to the Data folder for the "postgres" user.

[Mardon]

Murat, I have been able to get Daminion Server reinstalled and the majority of my photos put into a newly created catalogue. I am VERY pleased with how well Daminion has worked during the process of building the new shared catalog. I already have over 1/4 million images in the new catalogue and there has not been a single crash or problem during the import process. It's so much different than I remember with the early Beta versions. The biggest challenge was to remember all the Daminion configuration settings for file handling, etc.

 

 

Uwe, I have used symbolic links ever since I bought the SSD for my OS. All my Windows libraries are on G: with symbolic links pointing there. Some programs don't entirely recognize symbolic links though. For example, Daminion itself installs with the "Folders to store uploaded files" to the User area on C: drive instead of to the symbolic link User location on G: drive. That's not a big issue since Daminion allows that location to be set manually. But it makes the point. I've found that a few other programs ignore the symbolic links without giving that manual override option. I am careful to back up all my data on a regular basis, so I don't have an issue there. Unfortunately I wasn't being as careful about keeping an up-to-date ISO image of my OS Drive. I knew I should be doing that but I got 'lazy'. An ISO copy is fantastic. Even the outdated ISO copy I had on hand saved me a lot of time rebuilding. I use Paragon to create the clone. From now on I will be more careful about doing regular cloning of my OS drive as well as my usual data backups.

 

 

Juha, Thanks for your additional suggestions. I tried a few things similar to what you described but it started to get over my head technically. I gave up and just created a new database. It took a few days but Daminion operated flawlessly as it added the files.

 

Thanks all! Mardon