Sometimes, despite best intentions, unwanted or adverse changes might be applied and you need a way to quickly and safely restore the affected SAP system to its pre-import state. ActiveControl Backout supports this requirement through the creation of Backup requests.
A backup request is a special transport request that ActiveControl can be configured to create in each client of the target SAP system before a selection of transport requests is imported. The purpose of a backup request is to export (and thereby save) an image of the content that is about to be changed by the import process, which can then be applied to revert out the changes in the event of an issue.
Each attempt to import a selection of transport requests is logged and is referred to as an import run. ActiveControl associates each backup request with its corresponding import run. If necessary, it is possible for an administrator to back out the changes applied by an import run by clicking on the Backout Import Run toolbar button in the History pane when displaying the target SAP system’s import queue. When this is done, ActiveControl restores the pre-import state of the SAP system by simply importing the backup request back into the SAP client from which it was exported. If the target SAP system is configured with multiple clients, then the backup request created for each client is imported into each of the corresponding clients.
Creating backup requests slows the import process and so ActiveControl will only create backup requests for a target SAP system if the import option “Automatically create backup transport requests” is enabled. In addition, the following technical requirements must be observed:
1. A virtual system called BAK must be defined in TMS. This virtual system is necessary because backup requests are transport requests of type “transport of copies” and the virtual system BAK is specified as the target system in the transport request header (as displayed in transaction SE10).
2. The logon details specified on the target system’s RFC destination (see RFC Destinations) must be valid for each client specified in the target’s properties. This is required so that ActiveControl can log into the correct client when creating and applying backup requests, so that client dependent content can be correctly backed up and restored.
3. If using Backout, you also need to set the STMS parameter ‘tadirdeletions’ = “True” in each of the systems where Backout transports will be created.
4. Import runs must be backed out in reverse chronological order in order to guarantee the integrity of the SAP system. Of course, changes can only be backed out if backup requests were created when the import run was applied.
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