When you delete an item (content or space) in Alfresco, the item will not be deleted from the server, but will be moved to a temporary store called archive space store. This gives you the opportunity to recover the content that you have deleted, if necessary. More information about recovering deleted content is provided in Chapter 5.

Deleted items will be kept in the temporary store forever, and will eventually consume a significant amount of storage space. It is best to purge these items periodically. Purged items are deleted forever, and cannot be recovered. It is recommended that take backups of your data before purging.

Your log files present you with information on very important issues and problems about your system. The level of details logged will be based on the defined level of logging (INFO, ERROR, and DEBUG). Refer to Chapter 3, where you have set the level of logging to DEBUG.

The log files are named alfresco.log (current files) or alfresco.log.YYYY-MM-DD (older files). Examine one of the log files, and you will notice that the log entries fall into the following categories.

Some sample messages are as follows:

14:20:42,088 WARN  [org.hibernate.cache.EhCacheProvider] Could not find configuration [org.jbpm.graph.def.Node]; using defaults.
14:21:45,056 ERROR [org.alfresco.repo.action.ActionServiceImpl] An error was encountered whilst executing the action 'import'.
org.alfresco.service.cmr.view.ImporterException: Failed to import package at line 8; column 19 due to error: A complete repository package cannot be imported here…
15:03:19,308 INFO  [org.alfresco.repo.admin.patch.PatchExecuter] No patches were required. .

You have to fix the errors listed in the log file, and make sure there are no ERROR messages in the log files. There are many utilities (based on the operating system), that examine the log file for ERROR messages, and send you notifications whenever necessary. Consider using such a tool, or developing such a tool, to be notified as soon as an ERROR occurs.

The administrator has the highest powers in the Alfresco application. It is a good practice to periodically change the administrator's password as a security process. You can change the password by using the Alfresco Explorer's User Profile option.

If you forget the administrator's password, then you can reset the password by carrying out the following steps:

If you are setting up an environment to test your Alfresco application, then you might want to remove or reset the data once the testing has been done. There might be other circumstances, where you want to remove the existing users, spaces, and rules from the repository and start from a fresh installation. Before deleting or resetting the complete repository, you might want to back it up.

The following is the process to reset the complete repository data:

When you start Alfresco, the alf_data folder will be created and the default database tables will be created automatically.

The process of migrating an instance of Alfresco, running on one server to another server, follows a similar pattern to the Backup process, with additional steps for ensuring that any configuration is also copied over.