Recover CMS deleted history

[Peter Barkas]

Is there a way to restore history from the HISTORY.DMP file created using the CMS DELETE HISTORY command?

[Martin Michalecz]

Not that I know. (That does not state, that it is impossible !)

But the CMS history is stored in 01CMS.HIS.
Maybe you can retrieve this file fom a backup ?

Martin

[Peter Barkas]

Thank you for the response.

Unfortunately, 'go back to backup' is not an option because changes have been made to the CMS library since the history was deleted.

[Martin Michalecz]

The 01CMS.HIS seems to be a normal non indexed sequential file. Maybe you can simply add the deleted lines using an editor or script i.e. from the backup

Just an idea...

Martin

[Peter Barkas]

Thank you for the response.

Interesting idea. If I can work out how to set up a meaningful test environment I will try that.

[Martin Michalecz]

To set up a testenvironment you only need some diskspace :-)

Copy everything under the directory ([CMS...]) to a new location. You can access this CMS using CMS SET LIBRARY specifying the new location.

Of course you must either correct / check fileownerships / protections or use some privileges. Don't think that this is an issue for an test.

To get a consistent snapshot access to the cms library should be suspended during the backup.

As an alternativ you can restore the last backup to a new location (Take care not to overwrite the original directory tree due to som backup command typing errors!). The backup should be constistent if ist is taken at an appropriate time of day/week.

Hope this helps. Let us now the result.

Martin

[Peter Barkas]

Thank you for the response.

As soon as I have time I will try this and report back.

[Peter Barkas]

I found a bit of time and hacked up a routine to recover the history.

I was going to write it in DCL but it was easier to do in DEC BASIC.

It's a merge of 01CMS.HIS and HISTORY.DMP in to a new version of 01CMS.HIS. Copy record 1 and drop record 2 from HIS, insert the DMP records and then append the rest of the HIS records.

The DMP records need a bit of manipulation to get them in to HIS format: drop the leading space, add centiseconds to the time, quote the object with DEL and drop the quotes round the comments.

Rename the file and job's done.

[Peter Barkas]

...and so to bed

[KapilKapsi]

Hi Peter

In your last post you said: -

"The DMP records need a bit of manipulation to get them in to HIS format: drop the leading space, add centiseconds to the time, quote the object with DEL and drop the quotes round the comments."

Could you please clarify by what you meant by "quote the object with DEL"?

This is fairly urgent!!

Waiting for your reply.