HELP. How to restore DSpace collection from AIP?

[Carolyn Sullivan]

Hello all,

I am sincerely requesting your help.  Someone with admin permissions deleted a community in DSpace by mistake, and we're trying to get it back.  We're following the documentation provided here: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/AIP+Backup+and+Restore#AIPBackupandRestore-HowdoesthisdifferfromtraditionalDSpaceBackups?WhichBackuprouteisbetter?

The command our Systems Analyst ran to try to get back the collection is: sudo -u tomcat /var/dspace/bin/dspace packager -r -a -k -t AIP -e [his username] /var/dspace/bak/aip/aip19705.zip

So far, the command's been running for 24 hours, and it's only 2/3 of the way finished, and still, none of the items are appearing!  

What we need to know:  

(1) Have any of you used this command before?

(2) Why is this command taking so long to execute?  Is that normal?

(3) Are there any processes we need to complete after running this command to make the items appear?  Like indexing something?

Any guidance you could give would be deeply appreciated.

Best,

Carolyn.

[Michael Plate]

Hi Carolyn,

Am 20.09.24 um 22:05 schrieb Carolyn Sullivan:

> Hello all,
>
> I am sincerely requesting your help.  Someone with admin permissions
> deleted a community in DSpace by mistake, and we're trying to get it
> back.  We're following the documentation provided
> here: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/AIP+Backup+and+Restore#AIPBackupandRestore-HowdoesthisdifferfromtraditionalDSpaceBackups?WhichBackuprouteisbetter?
>
> The command our Systems Analyst ran to try to get back the collection
> is: sudo -u tomcat /var/dspace/bin/dspace packager -r -a -k -t AIP -e
> [his username] /var/dspace/bak/aip/aip19705.zip
>
> So far, the command's been running for 24 hours, and it's only 2/3 of
> the way finished, and still, none of the items are appearing!

[…]

it must be a collection with some more items, I assume, or you have to
increase the memory (e.g. 32GB).

We had that by an upgrade from 1.7.x to 5.x in 2018, and it was really
hard - I waited a full week for ~ 4500 items (whole repo), but it died.

Solution was to split up it in smaller chunks, e.g. generating the top
level communities and import them step by step.

I assume the duration you see is by the the database transaction DSpace
does - you will not see anything until it successful finishes, this is
normal.

You could create the collection first w/o any items and then import the
items in chunks or in loop (e.g. every item on its own). I think this
means w/o the "-a" for recursion first to create the empty collection,
but I'm not sure. If the whole collection is gone you might not need the
"-k" (look carefully on any of those things, a test system might be
helpful).

After import, it depends on your backup options what to do - we do not
include the TEXT and THUMBNAIL bundles, because one can create them by
filter-media later.

But, maybe your import is finished by now anyway…

Michael

[Carolyn Sullivan]

Thank you so much for the suggestion of breaking this up into smaller chunks, it's incredibly helpful for getting the script to finish running.  We really appreciate the advice <3  We're still working on a solution, but we appreciate this info a lot, Michael <3