All relevant data (Repositories, User and Roles, License) is stored within the UserData folder on your IDIOM Decision Server at [IDIOM Repository Server Install Folder]\UserData.

We strongly recommend that you backup this folder on a regular basis. Ideally you backup up this folder on a nightly basis on a network drive or another secure location. Keep a long enough history to ensure you always have a working backup of your solution.

You can at any time replace your current UserData folder with an older version of it and start working based on this data. Please note that you cannot backup your userdata folder to an older IDIOM Decision Manager version.

The Downside of this strategy is that you need to revert all repositories at once. You cannot just revert one repository at a time.

Strategy 2: Backup Repositories when releasing Decision Models

When using the the Production Release or Deployment process to release your Decision Models you can define actions to be taken before and after the deployment process.

You can define a process as follows:

1) Generate Code

2) Build dll/jar file

3) Export repository

4) Generate Documentation

5) Run a post build action to  check all relevant exported artefacts into source control

6) Finish

This allows you to backup every version of the repository that was released.

Please note:  This strategy does not backup your users and workgroups to which they are assigned. This means, should you loose your server data due to a hardware malfunction you would need to re-enter your users and re-assign them to the workgroups. Also, you will only have backups of your released repositories and not of any of the stages in between. The benefit of this approach is that you can revert a single repository at anytime by taking it out of the source control and re-importing it via the Decision Managers Import functionality.

Recommendation:

We recommend that you combine both strategies. This will give you the possibility to recover your entire solution at any point in time as well as to create a history of all released Repositories and the possibility to revert back to an older version of each of them.

In addition to this you should export and save your repository during any active period of development on a regular basis. This provides you with a manual rollback to previous development states, and is useful if you are ‘experimenting’ with solutions. Use the export function in the Release panel to do this.

Hint: You might want to have a look at the Auditing feature as well. IDIOM Decision Manger is able to log every decision model change on a repository into a SQL Server database.