Innopay requested a tool which can provide backup capabilities for all information stored in Groove. Data backup involves the storing of files from Groove in another location. In this way, if there is ever any loss of data in Groove, the lost data can still be retrieved from the backup location. As Innopay uses Groove in its daily activity, important files get stored here. Therefore, any loss of data can be devastating (Groove does not have restoring capabilities).

The tool is meant to provide assurance that the data can be retrieved in case it gets lost by mistake.  

Microsoft Office Groove does not provide a backup functionality and offering a product that allows this will cover a market niche.  Groove does not allow searching or indexing the workspaces. To allow third party tools to index all files in groove all workspaces need to be mirrored to the file system.

In order to implement a full and incremental backup solution for Groove file system structure a one-way synchronization must be performed that backs up the folder structure from Groove to a storage location. During synchronization, the Groove folder structure is copied in a storage folder specified by the user in the service configuration file.

Groove SABS will perform a full backup once a month (by default will be on the 1st day of month) and a daily incremental backup (by default at 1 AM). Incremental backup is a backup of every file on the file system that has changed since the last backup. Both full and incremental backups will be detailed in the Scenarios chapter.

Logs with all the changes performed during the synchronization (in correspondence with the previous one) are kept in the log file created for each synchronization process.

Because the path maximum length is 260 characters, Groove SABS replaces the name of each identity, workspace and tool with a number and this mapping is kept in an .xml file.

During synchronization process, while the service iterates through Groove entities hierarchy, for each entity found a new entry in the xml file will be created specifying its name, id and uri.

The xml file contains an entry for the Groove identity entities list. Each identity has the following properties and a list of workspaces as children in the xml file: Identity name, Identity URI, Identity ID, List of workspaces. Using this mapping file the user can uniquely link the path from the backup folder from local file system to the path in the Groove file system.