Tag: Quality Center

HP ALM – How to Restore after Disaster

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Situation: Someone on your team has accidentally deleted Test Cases / Scripts / Results / etc. from ALM.

Just in case you aren’t familiar with the structure HP ALM stores data, here are the basics. All of the data stored in ALM (test cases, runs, defects) live in a database on a SQL Server. A unique DB exists for every ALM project.

Usually when you suffer this kind of event,  you have only a few options:

  1. Restore the specific DB impacted. Now, if your lucky the SQL server routinely backs-up all DBs stored on it. (That ALM is configured to use) If that is the case, here is what I think the best solution is. Completing Step 2 reduces the impact to only one project and allows you reconcile differences from the impacted project and the restored one. It also protects other teams if the Server is a shared system vs. doing a complete restore of a Drive in totality. Following the steps below will create a new project in ALM with the restored data from a back-up.
  • Login to HP Site Admin
  • Create a new Empty Project (Project X)
  • Note the DB name for this new project. (I.E. NewProject_DB)
  • De-activate the New project in Site Admin
  • Open SQL Server, and Re-name the DB you just took Note of (NewProject_DB) and append it with _Old (NewProject_DB_Old)
  • Identify the DB of the Project that lost the data (I.E. SomeoneDeletedME_DB)
  • Restore and rename the DB (SomeoneDeletedME_DB) from back-up to the one created in the new project. (NewProject_DB)
  • Activate the new project (Project X) in Site Admin
  • Assign an Admin user to the project
  • Login and verify procedure was successful
  1. Restore the entire System (via many means). While this will do the ‘trick’ it will also wipe out all progress from all Projects in ALM. Meaning, if you have multiple teams using ALM, everyone will be impacted. Also, if this is a shared server, you could impact many other teams. If restoring a system, ideally if you can specify the drive that will help to a certain extent. This should only be done as a last resort.
  2.  Do Nothing. If you don’t have any back-ups then you better get to work….

HP ALM 12.50 Administrator Guide