ABB Composer and Conductor

A

Thread Starter

Alan

Hi,

I have a client at a very remote site and difficult to access. They have ABB/Bailey Conductor NT V2.3 and Composer V3.2.

They seem very unsure of how to carry out the Project Backup/Restore procedures for both these applications.

My question is, is this a difficult procedure or is it a simple function available from the tool bar menues on each application?

Many thanks,
Alan
 
W
First of all, WHY are you asking here?
ABB has worldwide service offices...and they also have the answer.

Get ABB to help you work with your client. It will save your client headaches and money, and make you a hero.

This goes for anybody who has problems with any vendor. If you don't call the vendor, you get what you deserve.

Walt Boyes
Editor in Chief
CONTROL magazine
555 W. Pierce Rd., Suite 301
Itasca, IL 60506
Phone: +1-630-467-1301 x 368
[email protected]
www.controlglobal.com

Blogging Sound OFF!! Editors' Blog at controlglobal.com
or direct at http://waltboyes.livejournal.com
 
C

Chris Jennings

It really depends on what kind of backup they require. For a Conductor system I usually have a disk image of the server (using something like Norton Ghost) and then use the Backup that is available from the Menu. So if I have a hard disk failure I simply put a new disk in, restore the disk image and then restore the backup of the Conductor system.

Composer is different but from what I know you just need to have a backup of the folder on the hard disk that contains the Composer files. So once again a Ghost image of the hard disk and then a weekly copy of the Composer data files.

Always remember to test your disaster recovery plan by restoring your backup to a test server to check that your backups work.

Chris Jennings
 
C

Chris Jennings

To be perfectly honest, I find that "real" users give better answers to these kinds of problems than many vendors. Vendors have their official ways of doing things and then there is the way people actually do it in the real world. How many people actually follow vendor instructions exactly as printed?

I personally have no problems with people asking questions that are specific to vendors system. In this case there are many different ways to deal with this backup issue. My method might be better or worse than the "official" ABB version, someone else might have a better method.

So perhaps you might like to think about what you think we "should" be discussing in this list? Because if we shouldn't ask questions that can be solved by vendors or a manual what the heck are we going to talk about? Politics?

Chris Jennings
 
Okay Walt (and everyone) I asked the vendor of Conductor NT - ABB, several MONTHS ago and so far all I've received from them, is what appears to be a generic e-mail that assures me someone will get back to me with help options, 'very soon'. I'm still waiting...
So here I am asking the forum, since this 'vendor' was unable to offer a solution:

With respect to backing up a Conductor NT 6.0 (or probably any other version would be the same), is there any way other than rebooting the computer or completely shutting down the entire Conductor NT server (by closing processes from the Windows Task Manager), to recover a 'frozen' Backup / Restore' utility?

We have some Conductor NT servers here that we used to back-up daily using Cond. NT's built-in Backup / Restore utility - normally accessed via Menu-> Utilities-> Backup/Restore > (select 'Backup' to run a backup) and NORMALLY a dialog / Wizard opens where you can select what you wish to backup, then where you want to save it and add a comment, then finally click OK and the backup starts...

However, with at least 2 of our servers, the backup dialog no longer appears after selecting 'Backup', instead we see an error message: "Window Already Open" (with an OK button that you must click to hide the annoying message).

The only solution we know of to restore it back to normal is a total reboot - either by closing all the processes from Windows Task manager, or easier - just restarting the computer from the Windows shutdown menu.

Does anyone know of a way to return the Backup / Restore facility without going that far? I.e. is there a process we can kill from Windows Task Manager? If there is such a process, nobody here knows what it might be (if indeed there is one that shows up in there at all)...

It's also believed that the problem is only manifested whenever the 'Cancel Backup' button at the bottom of the backup progress dialog box is clicked. Typically, whenever a 'newbie' comes along and starts the backup, then sees some error message (about some insignificant thing like SOE missing, because we don't have it), so he clicks OK in the error message, but also clicks 'Cancel Backup' because he thinks the error meant something terrible was about to happen... And this apparently cancels the Backup forever, or at least until the server is rebooted!

Surely this is a 'bug' anyway, one should be able to cancel the backup at will, then start again later??

All our servers are Conductor NT v 6.0 and run on Windows XP SP 3 computers.

If anyone has encountered this one before (I'm sure we're not alone here), but knows of a solution that does not require the server to be shutdown, we'd be most interested in hearing from you...
 
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