Creating a Data Snapshot from LOC SMS

This document outlines the steps necessary to create a data snapshot from a production instance of LOC SMS, for testing purposes. Please see here for a little more info on why you might do this.

These steps assume that you have a backoffice server (head office or store) instance of SMS which is running in production. This production server should be the machine on which you perform the steps.

Prerequisites

First you must install (and perhaps configure) Rattail; in particular the rattail.sw.locsms (>=0.3a13) package.

Create the Snapshot

Open a terminal and change directory to your Desktop, or another convenient location of your choice. Then execute the following command:

$ rattail sms-backup-data data.zip

Note that the data.zip argument may be any path and filename of your choice. You can run this command to see all the options:

$ rattail help sms-backup-data

What Just Happened?

Just to be clear about what is in this snapshot:

Typically each SMS server instance has a nightly scheduled task which creates a full backup (job 60, "Backup program"). Part of this backup includes generating "load" files to the instance's "load" folder (usually C:\Storeman\Office\Load).

The Rattail utility simply generates a ZIP file which contains some of these load files, which were created the last time SMS ran its backup. Note that this implies the snapshot file will not contain "current" (real-time) data, but rather the data which existed as of sometime in the middle of the previous night. If you need more current data than that, you must first execute a true SMS backup job, and then use Rattail to grab the snapshot.

Of course also note that Rattail isn't doing anything really magical here. This utility exists for convenience only, and the convenience comes primarily from the fact that it has a (hard-coded) notion of which load files are worthy of a testing snapshot. If you want all the load files then you're probably better off just zipping the contents of the load folder yourself...