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AWS RDS Backup Restore

This post describes a backup/restore procedure for the Content Manager database in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment). The database is a MSSQL instance running on as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

The existing database is from an SDL Tridion 2013 environment, and as such, after the restore in the new SDL Web 8.5 environment, it will have to be upgraded to SDL Web 8.5.

Performing the backup implies taking the database offline and executing the stored procedure:

exec msdb.dbo.rds_backup_database 'Tridion_cm_2013', 'arn:aws:s3:::mybackup/Tridion_cm_2013.bak'

The procedure is described in http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/SQLServer.Procedural.Importing.html

Performing the restore implies executing the following stored procedure in the new RDS database:

exec msdb.dbo.rds_restore_database 'Tridion_cm_2013','arn:aws:s3:::mybackup/Tridion_cm_2013.bak',''

While the restore is running, you can track the progress by calling rds_task_status

exec msdb.dbo.rds_task_status @task_id=4

The restore process is quite lengthy, but a log is available in one of the fields returned by rds_task_status:

Task execution has started.
Tridion_cm_2013.bak: Completed processing 5.02% of S3 chunks.
RESTORE DATABASE successfully processed 9358282 pages in 1409.730 seconds (51.862 MB/sec).
...
Tridion_cm_2013.bak: S3 processing completed successfully
Command execution completed successfully.

As usual, after restore, the old database logins are not available anymore, because they have been disassociated between the old and new databases instances. The existing TCMDBUser user must be altered in order to associate it with the new TCMDBUser user from the new database:

ALTER USER TCMDBUser WITH LOGIN=TCMDBUser


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