How can I roll back to an earlier version of CompleteFTP?

Question

Sometimes, it might be necessary to roll back to an earlier version of CompleteFTP.

For example one user is developing a new change control process, and part of that process that requires a roll back plan to the previous version of CompleteFTP.

Answer 1

Rolling back CompleteFTP is quite easy. The most crucial step is restoring the old version's configuration file.

CompleteFTP uses a configuration file called config.db (prior to 22.0 the file is config.sdf), and it is stored here:  

C:\ProgramData\Enterprise Distributed Technologies\Complete FTP

When an upgrade is performed, a backup of the old configuration file is stored here:

C:\ProgramData\Enterprise Distributed Technologies\Complete FTP\Backup

Backups are named by their version number, and are called either daily_[version]_[date].db or update_[version]_[date].db.

To roll back to a specific version, you need the most recent configuration file for this version,. e.g. to roll back to 9.1.3 from 10.0.0, you need to locate the most recent version of the 9.1.3 config file. For the installation on the author's machine, that file is update_913_20161222.sdf. 

Once this file is located, follow these steps:

1. Uninstall CompleteFTP (it won't remove backups).

2. Copy the previous version's configuration file (e.g. update_913_20161222.sdf) to the configuration directory (C:\ProgramData\Enterprise Distributed Technologies\Complete FTP), renaming it to config.sdf.

3. Install CompleteFTP using the rollback version's installer (obtainable from our customer site).