Archiving a Product Line?

Although we are only doing limited purges here because of user reluctance, regulatory requirements, and such, you can take a look at the Lawson 300 level jobs. AP300, AR300, IC300, PO300, etc. These jobs will do the purging/archiving for you.

The archive/purge jobs are for a partial archive of a product line, i.e. removing the oldest records & keeping current. This is a complicated undertaking. But it sounds like you are wanting to archive the ENTIRE productline, so that you can free the resources but have the option of brining it back at a later date. In this case, I would just rely on a Oracle backup of all the tables. You can write it to tape, and if required you could restore the data to a recreated product line. The productline data is ordinarily in it's own Oracle instance, or at least it's own schema.

If required, you could also back up the whole productline directory $LAWDIR/productline too. Most of the data in that directory is probably redundant and could be recreated, but there are some parts you might need to keep (e.g. workfiles). I would keep it simple and back up the whole thing to tape.

If you also need to archive and possibly restore environment data like user security, printer definitions, jobs, or EDI data that would be in the GEN or LOGAN areas that would be a separate task.

Look for the documentation on the product line copy process. Backing up an entire productline is much like doing half of the productline copy. You would just write all the files to an archive location that would be loaded to the target in the productline copy procedure.

You have a good point there, Ben. When Kevin asked the question, I guess I didn't really think it all the way through.
Those are good instructions! Instead of just writing files to archive locations, we like to use tar here, but it's really all what you are comfortable with.

In addition to keeping a just a copy/archive of the database, you would need to keep a copy of the $LAWDIR/productline/ (e.g. metadata in particular) files. These would be required if you wanted to restore/recreate the product line. In other words, the database backup and the productline backup need to be backed up and restored in sync. You wouldn't want to copy your PROD product line two years from now to create an "ARCH" productline, and restore the archived database--they would likely be out-of-sync.

You can find the step by step procedure under the AMT administration guide - copy productline. You only need to perform the "from PL" steps and archive those files. In the event that you need to bring the productline back, you can use the "to PL" steps.

Don't forget to perform the database backup also.

Thank you for the information.  I definitely feel more enlightened.