how to find relevant database from restore database

Dear Josef,

An ARIS Express model file (aka .adf file) gets imported into the commercial ARIS by its content not by file name. So whatever model content you had there, such as model title or object names, use them to search your database.

Ask your DB administrator to restore that database on your test server and grant access to you, so that you can search your ARIS database, either in Connect or Architect.

If you DB administrator shows to you only tables, he probably has opened up an exported ARIS database file (file extension .adb) which represents an ARIS database in ZIP format. But such a file isn't meant to be opened up as an archive and searched its various files. For consistency reasons I strongly advise not to change any file within an .ADB file.

I hope this helps.

Cheers
Rune

Hi,

I have trouble making sense of your description. There are multiple layers of data:

1. A database level backup, where a DB admin makes backup of MS SQL server or Oracle databases will most certainly be unreadable for any human outside of SAG R&D department (at least it is beyond my comprehension, although I worked with relational databases and I am familiar with SQL). It is a last resort to restore a corrupted environment with the help of Software AG support.

2. The next backup level is on application level. Those are the .adb files Rune mentioned. They contain an entire ARIS database. Internally that is a zipped set of XML files. With some effort you may be able to interpret that format. But the best way to recover something from that file is to restore that as a database to the ARIS Server and then simply browse the content for the artefacts you need and to merge them back to your production database.

3. .adf files do not occur anywhere. They are the file format of ARIS Express and that is not used anywhere in ARIS, neither for backups. ARIS can import those into a database, but you do that only once. They are not suitable for backups. Upon import of such a file ARIS creates a model and objects and connections for everything it finds in that file. The adf file itself is not retained anywhere in the database. If you imported that file again, all objects would be created again, most likely giving you duplicates.

I hope this helps to clarify things.

Regards, M. Zschuckelt