HI Bogdan

If you were working with minor increments of Tableau Server such as restoring v10.4.3 to v 10.4.1 you'd be OK, but it isn't possible to do this across major version changes, just as it isn't possible to publish from a v10.4 Desktop to a v10.1 server.  There are too many features introduced that aren't backward compatible.  THis article has more info - Workbook Version Compatibility

It might be with the recent changes in the v10.5 release that allows you to save back to an earlier version of Desktop (v10.2+ though), that this may well change with server backups.

Our approach when managing an upgrade is we take a full backup prior to upgrade and in the event we need to downgrade, we will restore the original backup.  The downside here is any content changes on the server post upgrade will be lost.  We try to keep the transtion window very small and set user expectations, discouraging much activity during this time.

Donna

Ditto to everything that Donna just said.

Ditto on the ditto

Hi Donna,

when you say Restore the backup, do you mean just restore or do you have to uninstall the current version, install the older version then restore?

Hi Nawras

If you're downgrading, you'll need to uninstall the currrent version, re-install the version you want to downgrade back to and then restore the backup you took prior to starting the upgrade process.

Regards

Donna

Thank you for the quick reply Donna!

To clarify, if I still have the previous version installed, do I need to only uninstall the current version without reinstalling the previous version? or do I still need to reinstall it?

Also, do I actually even need to uninstall the current version? is there a way to use another version without uninstalling the current one? sounds to me this is fair to say, but never done it before so curious on this.

Thanks again,

Nawras

Hi Nawras

Slightly confused about what you mean when you say you have a previous version installed...  I've upgraded a PoC server we have multiple times, and I can see files in the Windows Expolorer folder structure that relate to previous versions, but actually only 1 instance (the latest one) exists if I check the 'add/remove programs' feature on the server.  I don't think you can have multiple instances of Tableau Server running on the same server, but this just might be a misunderstanding by me and how our current set up is...

My assumption is that to be safe, you will need to uninstall the current version (10.4.3) and then reinstall the previous version (10.1.7) to get the server back running as a 10.1.7 instance, and then apply the restore.  I think if you just try to install the 10.1.7 back over the top of 10.4.3, it would error, as it would think you're trying to 'upgrade' and will detect a later version than what you're trying to install.

Apologies for my vagueness.  I've never had to actually do a 'rollback' and I'm not actually allowed to touch our main servers when we do upgrades on prod.  I have colleagues in our Infrastructure team who manage all this, and are much more knowledgeable about how the servers & applications work.  My primary role is server admin from a UI point of view, and I come from more of a development background than infrastructure & networks.

Donna