Help, how to restore an accidentally deleted Wiki

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Help, how to restore an accidentally deleted Wiki

Hi All,

I have been running the wiki on my OS X server for some time now. Currently using Mavericks 10.9.1 and I went to delete a page from one of the wiki's and when prompted I didn't read the dialog box and clicked om "permenantly delete" and my whole wiki disappeared. I have two others on different topics that still appear and operate just fine but the other wiki is now nowhere to be found. I've found old posts when the wiki was stored in /Library/Collaboration/.... but nothing on the "latest" wiki locations. Can someone point me at a method to restore (from time machine) my wiki. I have not make any changes to any of the wiki's since I accidentally deleted this wiki, I'm hoping it is as simple a restoring a file or files from time machine.

TIA

ron

Mac Mini 2009, 2010, 2011-OTHER, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), Max OS X Server (10.9.1)

Posted on Dec 29, 2013 9:27 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Dec 29, 2013 12:52 PM in response to rfh723

Shut down the Wiki service, then restore /Library/Server/Wiki and reboot.

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Answer 2

rfh723 Author

Level 1

10 points

Dec 29, 2013 1:46 PM in response to Linc Davis

Thanks for the reply, however I am having an issue doing this. No problem shutting down the Wiki service but when I begin the restore it fails almost immediately with an error message that it cannot complete the operation because PostgreSocket is in use. Looking at the directory Wiki I see that the only file within it is the PostgreSocket directory, when time machine processes the restore it comes up with 1.24GB to restore in about 4500 files.

With the Wiki stopped I rebooted and tried again but no joy, same issue. Currently the server only has file sharing and VPN services enabled. Any idea?

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Answer 3

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Dec 29, 2013 2:23 PM in response to rfh723

There may be a better way, but this is Apple's way:

Restoring OS X Server from a Time Machine backup

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Answer 4

rfh723 Author

Level 1

10 points

Dec 31, 2013 4:35 AM in response to rfh723

Well I have resolved the issue and thought I would post here to let anyone else know how it was done.

First using the original input from Linc Davis that I should restore /Library/Server/Wiki I gave that a shot, however the restore aborted after a couple seconds with the error the PostgreSocket was in use. This caused some problems since some of the other files in the directory were deleted or something during this activity. Now I had no wiki's and any attempt to access the wiki resulted in a crash of the wiki. (Remember I had 3 wiki's and accidentially deleted one). So some head scratching ensued, I absolutely did not want to even consider restoring OS X in its entirety from a backup, this was just a non-starter for me.

So back into time machine and this time I restored the /Library/Server/Wiki directory from time machine and by right clicking (or CTRL + click) in the Wiki entry in time machine it prompts for an alternate location to restore to, I had it restore the Wiki directory into /Library/Server/Wiki so now my old Wiki was in /Library/Server/Wiki/Wiki. From here I booted into the Mavericks recovery partition (hold the Option key when starting the machine), then began a terminal session and renamed /Library/Server/Wiki to "xyzzy" and then within /Library/Server/xyzzy entered mv Wiki .. which moved the restored wiki data back to /Library/Server and then I removed rm -rf /Library/Server/xyzzy to get rid of the corrupted Wiki. Started up the Wiki within the server again and I was back in business.

I don't know that this is an officially sanctioned approach but it worked just dandy for me.

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