NAV 2013 R2: Backup and Restore

Since today, about 25 new “How Do I”-video’s were uploaded to youtube. This means.. video’s that were already available to partners, are now made available for everyone. As mentioned before, I have been participating in some video’s, including the one about Backup/Restore: How Do I: Backup and Restore in a Multitenant Environment in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 .

As you might know, the native backup/Restore tool has been removed from the stack .. plus .. multitenancy brings some new perspectives in this matter. Or should I say “challenges”. In this video, I try to tackle these challenges using Powershell. In this blog, I would like to share the powershell scripts that I used, for your convenience (I guess it’s somewhat easier to copy/paste from a blogpost ). For more info, I recommend you to watch the movie.

Backup

The backup script is actually just backing up the App-db and after that, looping through the tenants, and backup those databases as well.. :

$ServiceInstance = 'DynamicsNAV71'

#Backup the Application Database

$NavApplication = Get-NAVApplication $ServiceInstance

Backup-SqlDatabase -ServerInstance $NavApplication.'Database Server' -Database $NavApplication.'Database Name' -BackupAction Database

#Backup All the Tenant Databases

$NavTenants = Get-NAVTenant $ServiceInstance

Foreach ($NavTenant in $NavTenants) {

 Backup-SqlDatabase -ServerInstance $NavTenant.DatabaseServer -Database $NavTenant.Databasename -BackupAction Database

}
 

Restore from a folder

The restore is quite simply done as well.. : loop through the folder where all backups were placed, and restore the backups one-by-one:

$Backups = dir 'c:\$Restore\*.bak'

Set-NAVServerInstance DynamicsNAV71 -stop

foreach ($BackupFile in $Backups) {

 'Restoring ' + $BackupFile.Directory + '\' + $BackupFile.Name

 $server = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server localhost

 $backupDevice = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.BackupDeviceItem $BackupFile, "File"

 $Restore = New-object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Restore

 #Set properties for Restore

 $Restore.NoRecovery = $false;

 $Restore.ReplaceDatabase = $true;

 $Restore.Devices.Add($backupDevice)

 $RestoreDetails = $Restore.ReadBackupHeader($server)

 $Restore.Database = Get-ChildItem $BackupFile | % {$_.BaseName}

 $Restore.SqlRestore($server)

}
 

After this script, you have to mount the app and tenants to a multitenant serverinstance (which is basically what I explained in another video (also these scripts will be shared on a later stage)).

What about Backing up and Restoring 1 company

Well, I am planning a blog (or movie) about it, because there are some things to think about: mainly the fact that when you’re restoring a company in a tenant with shared tables (DataPerCompany=No), then those tables are going to be overwritten, and you have the chance of ending up with an inconsistant database. Be careful with this.

This is a great feature, but you have to know what you’re doing… . (and let’s be honest: should there be shared tables in the first place? ). Stay tuned…