Reset CMS Without "Uninstalling"

nightwolf1982

I just had to reset my Content Database, and of course, all of my products installed through Connect became "uninstalled".  My products are still installed, nothing was deleted, but because the CMS won't recognize the installed files, I'm having to "re-install" everything.  Which is a PAIN IN THE A$$ when you have over 3,000 proucts to "install".

I would like to see a fix introduced where, if a CMS reset becomes necessary, it doesn't "uninstall" everything.  Surely there must be some way to implement a scan of the Connect cloud directory for existing files/content?

Richard Haseltine

It should be fairly simple to parse the folder names in the /Data/cloud/ folder and tell Connect to tinstall them, which should be fast and consume little bandwidth as it will see it already has the files needed. I didn't do this but I did write a script that could be run before resetting the database, and which exported a list of installed products (and their New grouping, if present) but it didn't get finished (I was able to go to a backed-up version of the database); still, as a proof of concept it showed the approach to be workable (though it didn't always seem to see the isntalled files as matching the server)

nightwolf1982

Something like that, yes!  Or a way to import/parse the .json metadata files from the data/cloud/meta folder.  I've been running the "re-install"  over 24 hours now, and I've only completed 18%.

Richard Haseltine

The /data/cloud/meta/ folder should be everything you own (and that can take a while to populate in itself).

nightwolf1982

But that's my point, the meta folder is already populated.  The CMS should be able to scan the files in the meta folder, and update the Content Database with the appropriate metadata.  Instead, I'm having to do full on re-downloads of every product (some of which have thousands of files).  Which makes absolutely no sense to me.

Richard Haseltine

It is using a checksum to compare the local files with those on the servers, and downloading those whch differ. That still involves some traffic, of course, as it is checking each file (and getting the checksum for something like a preset is probably very fast).

nightwolf1982

But this is downloading every file.  I started the re-install on the 31st of March, and it's now the 4th of April.  From the looks of things I've got a couple more days of downloading to go, which is frustrating.  Comparing checksums for the files shouldn't take this long.

And the checksums shouldn't be different for every single file.  I keep my products up to date, and have only modified a few of the original install files (like, ten, tops), so there shouldn't really be that much to re-download.

The idea that I'm getting at though is that it should be possible to reset the CMS database and re-import the existing Connect content data, rather than having to re-download everthing.  Similar to how the metadata re-import works for non-Connect products.

Richard Haseltine

The files are getting written over the top of the ones that are there, not to a different location?

nightwolf1982

Yes.  For example, right now Connect is re-downloading Ravyn Character and Hair, and when I look at the file folder for the hair, the geometry dsf is present, but there's also a .part file, indicating that the dsf is being downloaded.

Richard Haseltine

I don't know whatb is happening, then - I certainly had some unexpected downloads when I was testing my script, but it did spot at least some of the files were right. I do wonder if some kind of disc utility or security software is confusing the CRC check.