ServiceDesk

Are there any best practices for backup/restore for SD?

Long story short we had to reload our soon to be production server friday and it did not go well, incurring at least another 12 hours of work ( this is really getting old ). Server was same hardware and name, just the OS changed.

Attempt 1 was to install + the existing DB option and that caused lots of DB issues and AD authincation broke.
Attempt 2 was to install + restore the DB from tape, which caused lots of permission issues. Some groups could not even log in anymore.

These attempts worked out as poorly as trying to create a sandbox for Dev and QA/UAT.  ( both required many hours of redoing from scratch )

Being this is the weekend i really cant call support for a non produciton issue, and dont want to be pushed back another 2 days so im going to spend all weekend rebuildng from scratch but there must be a way to do this properly for when we go into production. If not, we wont be going forward even after all this work over the last few months as we HAVE to be able to quickly recover from a hardware crash when we have 30000 end users relying on this. I could bring back v6 in almost no time. Reinstall the app and point to existing DB and we were off and running. Even if it was a different server name... But not here :(

I thought i already replied to this.  maybe it was a different thread.  it usually takes me about 4 hours to bring up my dev environment when copying the DB from production.  if you restore the DB you have to reinstall the service desk.  that's what take most of the time.  what i do

1. grab production db and restore on dev.
2. reinstall ServiceDesk.  this is what take the longest
3. after reinstall of SD is complete.  go to application settings and change any URLs to the appropriate URL for the server and change any service account passwords if necessary.
4. Reload all workflows that have been backed up.

doing this has worked well for me without any permission issues.  Obviously if the server names are the same then you could skip step 3 unless you are using different service accounts.