Dynamics GP Workflow Backup

 

It has been a very tough month, me and all my team which now are 12 consultants in Dynamics Innovations are overloaded with tasks and projects assignments, I am travelling to Jeddah - KSA the upcoming couple of hours and wanted to post some articles before it leave my remaining rooms of my mind!

I been in a situation the last couple of days were one of my customers had a failure in their portals server that holds the Workflow and the Business Portal, after performing the reinstallation and making sure that all systems are up and running, I realized that the workflow I have created for this clients is a tree with 7 levels in depth and 900 lines of conditions that checks the cost center for each purchase order line and redirect the purchase order for the concerned department manager for first line approval! In addition, imagine the documents that will be lost during the maintenance procedure and the documents that will be stuck between the workflow and Dynamics GP!

I been lucky having a planned backup performed on daily basis, where I been able to restore the backup and proceed with the production environment smoothly.

Worth to mention that when I used the backup set I had for the Workflow database it failed to launch the applications! I had to restore the entire web application from the SharePoint Central Administration portal to get this done.

I wanted to share the script I used to schedule the daily backup, it is basically a batch file that will be called by Windows Scheduler daily and will command the STSADM to perform a backup to specific folder, that will be automatically created based on the backup date, replace “<servername>” with your actual server name and “<port>” with your actual port:

@ECHO OFF
@SET STSADM="c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin\stsadm.exe"
for /F "tokens=1-4 delims=/- " %%A in ('date/T') do set DATE=%%B%%C%%D
for /F "tokens=1-4 delims=:., " %%a in ('time/T') do set TIME=%%a%%b%%c

echo Workflow Backup Operation Started....

%STSADM% -o backup -url http://<servername>:<port>/sites/DynamicsGPworkflow -filename "C:\WSS Backups\Daily Backups\Workflow\Workflow_%DATE%_%TIME%.dat"

echo Business Portal Backup Operation Started....

%STSADM% -o backup -url http://<servername>:<port> -filename "C:\WSS Backups\Daily Backups\Business Portal\BP_%DATE%_%TIME%.dat"

echo Farm Backup Operation Started....

MD "C:\WSS Backups\Daily Backups\Farm\FARM_%DATE%_%TIME%"
%STSADM% -o backup -directory "C:\WSS Backups\Daily Backups\Farm\FARM_%DATE%_%TIME%" -backupmethod full

:End

Paste this into NOTEPAD and save it with “.CMD” extension to be an executable package and schedule the run periodically.

Enjoy!

Regards,
--
Mohammad R. Daoud MVP - MCT
MCP, MCBMSP, MCTS, MCBMSS
+962 - 79 - 999 65 85
me@mohdaoud.com
www.mohdaoud.com