DBIMPEXP.exe functionality integrated into Lync 2013 Preview Management Shell

Prior to Lync Server 2013, there was a tool.  And this tool was called DBIMPEXP.exe.  It stands for Database Import Export.  This tool was part of the OCS and Lync 2010 Resource Kits, but will now be deprecated to make way for built-in Lync Management Shell PowerShell commands.  But before we talk about its replacement in detail, let’s talk a little bit about DBIMPEXE.exe’s capabilities. DBIMPEXP.exe was used to back up users contact and conference data.  In fact, part of the official backup instructions were to use the DBIMPEXP.exe to backup user data.

Lync Server 2010 – DBIMPEXP.EXE

Note: I am documenting the commands below for Enterprise Edition of Lync.  For Standard Edition, simply remove /sqlserver.

Backing up and restoring all user data

From the official, “Backing Up Core Data and Settings” Technet article, Microsoft provides the following DBIMPEXP.exe commands to back up user data:

An example would be:

To import data from your backed up .xml file, the following command would import user data:

An example would be:

 Backing up and restoring specific user’s data

There is more control over the usage of Dbimpexp.exe.  With the above commands, you are essentially backing up and restoring the entire rtc database for all user contact and conference information.  If we wanted to backup a specific  user’s contact/conference information, we can run the following command:

To import that specific user’s data from their backed up .xml file, the following command would import that user’s data.

Backing up specific data resource types

With the aforementioned commands, all have a /restype set to all.  This means both contact list and conference directory information is exported.  There is a way to backup either the user or conference data without exporting both.  To export only the user contact list data, the following restype would be specified:

To export only the conference data, the following restype would be specified

When using /restype:confdir, you can also specific a specific conference directory by using the /dirid switch as follows:

 Lync Server 2013 Preview – *-CSUserData

Lync Server 2013 Preview has deprecated the use of DBIMPEXP.exe.  There are now native Lync Mangement Server cmdlets to provide the equivalent.  These three commands are:

• Export-CSUserData – Exports User Data to a ZIP File
• Import-CSUserData – Imports User Data from a ZIP File.  This does require a restart of the Front End Service (RTCSRV) to allow the data from the SQL blob store to the RTC Database.  This is a fast process to import data and is geared more towards bulk import operations.
• Update-CSUserData – Updates User data from a ZIP File  This does NOT require a reboot of the Front End Service (RTCSRV)  but is an expensive and slow process and therefore, should only be run in one-off user scenarios rather than bulk import operations.
• Convert-CSUserData – Converts between a 2010 XML file provided from DBIMPEXP.exe and a ZIP file provided from Export-CSUserData

Note: For this article, I will be showing the new Export-CSUserData and Import-CSUserData commands.  In a future article for Lync Server 2013 RTM, I will provide more information on the remaining commands.

Export-CSUserData

This is the direct replacement for dbimpexp.exe /export.

The command I will be running against my test Lync Server 2013 Preview Pool is as follows:

After exporting the data, we see that we now have a ZIP file.

And within that ZIP, we get a couple XMLfiles.  The meat of the data is stored in DocItemSet.xml.

Just as with DBIMPEXP.exe, we can filter on specific users and conference directories for export.

To filter for a specific user, we would run the following command:

To filter for a specific Conference Directory, we would run the following command:

Import-CSUserData

This is the direct replacement for dbimpexp.exe /import.  It imports data from the ZIP file previously exported from Export-CSUserData.  Then the user data will be replicated with Active Directory automatically at regular time via Lync user replicator service

I will be importing the data I ran previously from Export-CSUserData. The command I will be running against my test Lync Server 2013 Preview Pool is as follows:

After importing the data, we see need to restart the Front End Service, RTCSRV, on all Front End Servers in the pool so that the restored data will propagate from the SQL blob store.

This can easily be achieved by running the following commands:

After all Lync Server 2013 Preview services have been stopped, the following command will start all the Lync Server 2013 Preview services.

Just as with DBIMPEXP.exe, we can filter on specific users and conference directories to import.

To filter for a specific user, we would run the following command:

To filter for a specific Conference Directory, we would run the following command: