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brian_g_snell's avatar
brian_g_snell
Occasional Contributor
4 years ago

How to retrieve archived reviews

We recently updated to rev 13.4 of Collaborator which allows for easier archiving and possible retrieval of reviews.  For the initial setup of the new Collaborator there were a number of reviews tagged for archiving, in bulk.  I now have  a review that i need to retrieve.  i accessed the Archiving folder on our server in an attempt to find and retrieve a review. The archive folder structure has a bunch other folder all titled like:  a1, a2,a3, ff, f1....  In those folders are files titled "367s420d9f....." 

 

1) how do i find out which file is the review i need to recover?

2) how do i open that file/unwrap it in Collaborator?

 

Thanks!!

Reviews
Server Administration
  • Igor_Klimov's avatar
    Igor_Klimov
    SmartBear Alumni (Retired)
    3 years ago

    Hello,

    When you archive the reviews via the WebUI, Collaborator removes the files from the reviews matching the specified date range and puts them in the specified folder, e.g. Collaborator server/tomcat/archives. 

    Before archiving, the files are located in the tomcat/collaborator-content-cache directory, in the subfolder matching the first three pairs of the file MD5 digest. E.g., the file whose MD5 is 6b7ea84cacc15f1f392788dfe16104f9 is expected to be found in the 6b/7e/8a subfolder. This is true for the archives folder, so, in other words, the files are present in the same subfolders, and the difference is the directory, which is archives, not collaborator-content-cache.

    Thus, if you want to restore the files for a specific review, you can:

    1. Open the review on the WebUI and click the file. An error message will pop up, and it will contain the file's MD5 in the body of the message. 

    2. Alternatively, you can generate a review dump file: https://support.smartbear.com/collaborator/faq/how-to-generate-a-review-dump-file/, unpack the dump archive, and locate the VersionData.xml. This is a database table containing the files data for this particular review. So, it contains the files' MD5 digests as well. Remember to choose the Normal dump format if you are using a Collaborator version later than 13.7, otherwise, it will be in the obfuscated format.