Restoring deleted content

I just wrote about backup and restore in AEM CS, and why backups cannot serve as a replacement for an archival solution. But instead it’s just designed as a precaution for major data loss and corruption.

But there is another aspect to that question: what about deleted content? Is requesting a restore the proper way to handle these cases?

Assume that you have accidentally deleted an entire subtree of pages in your AEM instance. From a functional point of view you can perform a restore to a time before this deletion of content. But that means that a rollback of the entire content is made, which means that not only this deleted content is restored, but also other changes which performed since that time would be undone.

And depending on the frequency of activities and the time you would need to restore this can be a lot. And you would need to perform all these changes again to catch-up.

The easiest way to handle such cases is to use the versioning features of AEM. Many activities trigger the creation of a version of a page, for example when you activate it, when you delete it via the UI; you can also manually trigger the creation of a version. To restore one page or even an entire subtree you can use the “Restore” and “Restore Tree” features of AEM (see the documentation).

In earlier versions of AEM versions have not been created for Assets by default, but this has changed in AEM CS; now versions are created for assets pretty much as they are creted for pages by default. That means you can use the same approach and restore versions of assets via the timeline (see the documentation).

With the proper versioning in place, most if not all of such accidental deletions or changes can be handled; this is the preferred approach to handle it, because it can be executed by regular users and does not have an impact on the rest system of the system by rolling back really all changes. And you don’t have any downtime on authoring instances.

For that reason I recommend you to work as much as possible with these features. But there are situations, where the impact is that severe that you rather want to roll back everything than restoring things through the UI. In that situation a restore is probably the better solution.