[Zope3-Users] zodb data recovery

[Pete Taylor]

Thinking about the ZODB and data recovery...

Let's say I have two or three sites all running off the same Data.fs
(through ZEO or otherwise).  Doing nightly backups, being good
sysadmins, etc.  Now I get a call from a user who says "I don't know
what happened to the content, but it was there three days ago, i
swear!"

So I look through my backups, load a Data.fs up in my python shell,
and start digging around, and sure enough, there's the data.

How do I get that data "back" so to speak?  I don't want to restore
the whole ZODB, that would blow away my other sites data, and any data
that any other user of that same site had created.  I know that zope3
doesn't provide any "dump data from this context on down" kind of
utils, but I was wondering what the standard way to do this was?  I'm
sure this problem has been run into ;)

I haven't run into this yet, but I'm in the midst of building a
site-with-many-subsites scenario, and I worry about these kinds of
things.  Certainly the "Undo" functionality is great, but it has
limits...  and in many ways, it's not the immediate "oh, oops, i
deleted that" kind of data destruction I'm worried about, though
that's there.  It's more the a-few-weeks-later kind of issue that I'm
worried about.

I'd considered opening up a connection to both Data.fs ZODB's,
establishing the correct context in both, and then repopulating all of
the data that way.  But anything that keys on ObjectEvent (or any
other design specific event) thrown during these object creations
would fail.  And unless we explicitly check for annotations and such,
I don't know if those would picked up just by moving all content
objects from a particular location.

Has anyone else solved this problem, or have suggestions toward
solving it?  I don't mind writing the scripts to repopulate data from
a restored zodb should that be necessary, but I don't really think
that's the right way to go, or at least not on it's own.

Any thoughts would be extremely welcome!
Pete

-- 
"All guilt is relative, loyalty counts, and never let your conscience
be your guide."
  - Lucas Buck, American Gothic