Cognos Planning Analyst

Backing up important data

Often there is confusion around what needs to be backed up when working with Cognos Planning Analyst, not only are there important data files to consider, but also some very important configuration files that hold pointers to data locations, permissions and locking information.

As the data in your Cognos Planning installations is of great importance and value to your organisation it is important to ensure that all the important information is backed up reliably.

Analyst Data Files

Analyst data sets are typically referred to as “Models” or “Libraries”, essentially this is data stored in a collection of operating system files that is normally stored on a network file share or shared drive.

As well as data in your Analyst installation there are a number of shared system files, these files hold information such as pointers to your data, object locking information and details on object ownership.

Provided you have a standard installation it is a simple process to ensure that you have your entire Analyst configuration and data backed up as in a standard installation all of these files are stored in the same directory tree structure.

A typical standard installation will consist of a shared “Cognos” folder on your server which in turn will contain an “Analyst” and “Libraries” folder.

The “Analyst” folder contains your “Network Installation” that is, your configuration data and the executable that is used to install your clients.
The “Libraries” folder would typically contain your Analyst data, the d-lists, d-cubes, d-links and the numbers etc.

The simplest way to back up a standard Analyst installation would be to ensure that the complete “Cognos” shared directory and its contents are backed up.

It is important to remember that usually, each Analyst library will have its own sub-directory within the “Libraries” folder.  When restoring this data you must take an “All or nothing” approach, for example if you have a library named “Sales” which has a corresponding folder named “Sales”, you must remember when restoring to a previous backup it is necessary to remove the existing “Sales” folder prior and to performing a complete restore of that folder from your tapes. 

Restoring individual files can cause problems with the Analyst indexes.

System Files

There are a number of system files that are shared in your Analyst Network installation folder, it is important that all the users of Analyst can read / write and execute on the entire “Analyst” directory for the system to function.

The majority of the important system files reside in the following folder on a standard installation: -

\\server_name\cognos\analyst\Cognos\ws\cer4\bin

The files to look out for are as follows: -

FILESYS.INI	Contains pointers to all the system files
LIBS.TAB	Contains the list of libraries and their locations.
USERCLASSES.TAB	Contains information on the userclasses imported into Analyst
PADLOCKS.TAB	Contains access rights information for Analyst objects.
USERS.TAB	Contains a list of users.