Back up your Content Central database

Take a verified backup of the Content Central SQL database in two commands — and know the four other things a complete restore point needs.

AdministratorsContent Central 7.x10 minutesVerified 2026-08-30

At the end of this guide you'll have a verified .bak file of your Content Central database — the backup you should take before any upgrade, migration, or major change, and on a regular schedule always.

Note

Backups run while Content Central is online. You do not need to stop services or kick users out — SQL Server backs up a live database safely.

Before you start

You need to know two things, both visible in the Configuration Manager (Start menu > Ademero) on the Content Central server:

Your SQL Server instance. If Content Central installed its own SQL Server, it's localhost\ADEMERO. If your organization uses its own SQL Server, use that name.
Your database name. The default is ContentCentral.

Steps

On the Content Central server (or any machine with SQL tools), open an administrator Command Prompt.

2
Take the backup — one command (adjust instance, database name, and destination):
```
sqlcmd -S localhost\ADEMERO -E -Q "BACKUP DATABASE [ContentCentral] TO DISK='D:\Backups\ContentCentral.bak' WITH COPY_ONLY, CHECKSUM, INIT"
```
note
COPY_ONLY means this backup won't interfere with any backup schedule your IT team already runs. CHECKSUM makes SQL Server validate every page as it writes — a corrupt backup that fails on restore day is worse than no backup.

Verify it — never trust an unverified backup:

sqlcmd -S localhost\ADEMERO -E -Q "RESTORE VERIFYONLY FROM DISK='D:\Backups\ContentCentral.bak' WITH CHECKSUM"

What you should see: The backup set on file 1 is valid.

Copy the .bak file somewhere that is not the Content Central server — another server, a NAS, or offline media. A backup that lives only on the machine it protects disappears with it.

Note

Prefer clicking? In SQL Server Management Studio: right-click the database > Tasks > Back Up…, Backup type Full, check Copy-only backup, and under Media Options check Perform checksum before writing to media. Same result.

A database backup is not a complete restore point

Your documents are files on disk, not rows in the database — the database holds everything about them. A complete restore point is the database plus:

What	Where
Document files	Your storage folders (default under `C:\ProgramData\Ademero\Content Central\`; check Configuration Manager > System Folders for relocated ones)
Search indexes	The Indexes system folder (rebuildable, but rebuilding a large system takes hours — backing up is cheaper)
Configuration	`C:\ProgramData\Ademero\Content Central\ConnectionInfo.xml`
Web settings	`web.config` in the Content Central website folder (only matters if your IT team customized it, e.g. for single sign-on)

Important

Back up the database and the document folders in the same window. A database restored from Monday pointing at files copied Thursday produces missing-document errors that are painful to reconcile.

How often?

At minimum: nightly database backups, document-folder backups on your organization's standard file-backup schedule, and an extra verified backup immediately before any upgrade or server change — kept until you've been stable on the new version for a comfortable period. If you already have an IT backup platform (Veeam, etc.), include the database and the storage folders in it and keep the pre-upgrade COPY_ONLY backup as your explicit restore point.