THIS is, infuriatingly, still a thing…if you don’t transfer the Activation BEFORE restoring, you risk data loss in commercial modules. This is something the CTO of Sangoma personally informed us was being addressed 3 years ago but it is still just as much a problem now as when we had that discussion with them all that time ago.
Here’s the workaround we found when migrating our customers between instances of FreePBX:
If you use the reset within portal.sangoma.com to reset the Zend ID, you can leave the old system in a running an activated state while you activate and restore the new one. The old system will retain its activation until it is rebooted, services are fully restarted, or it performs a normal check-in to the activation servers (I think this happens weekly still, but you have the day at the very least…enough time to restore data to new). This allows you to migrate/restore without having to deactivate the old system first. This is also the case if Sangoma has to reset the hardware lock on their end…the old system won’t “deactivate” until it checks in with the Activation servers at some point later, giving you time to prepare the new system properly.
Of course, this doesn’t address our root frustration with this restoration problem to begin with, but when even the C-Suite fails to take any perceptible action on a universal complaint from the customer base/partners/community, what can ya do?
Don’t want to hijack this thread beyond pointing out that I’m not aware of any cases of commercial module data being lost when restoring to an unactivated system. I have a QA ticket again on this now, and in my own very crude testing, I was not able to find any issues. If anyone is still seeing this anywhere, please open tickets with repro details or discuss in a new thread.
Yeah, sorry for that Lorne; only after you pointed it out did I realize I inadvertently hijacked a much more important thread cuz I was on mobile at the time and didn’t note the thread title.
The most common and potentially annoying instance of this we have seen is in EPM as of late - most other module mentions in our notes are a bit older now and may have been resolved in recent times.
We’ve seen all Extension Mappings and/or Templates vanish during a restore to an unactivated system, even if we activate it with valid license nearly immediately after restoring it. I think it is happening with Legacy Restores to v15+, but I’ve got my hands a little too full with the k.php crap to fire up my own tests until probably the weekend at this rate. If you haven’t found anything by then, I’ll see if I can recreate and grab the logs for you.
I tested a 16 restore from a 15 backup where 16 was not activated, and all EPM data was present. I will try to repro this with a legacy restore to see if that makes a difference. If someone can reliably repro this, don’t wait for me to test, open a ticket.