Restoring the instances.json File from a Backup

Knowledge Base Common Issues
1

Often caused by having a full disk, occasionally you’ll need to restore your instances.json from one of the local backups.

Main Indicators

  • Things will seem fine if the panel is still running, but once you either update or restart the ADS, you may notice that it fails to start again.
  • If it is a disk space issue, you may also see some errors in your game servers’ consoles/logs.
  • If all your instances disappear in the main panel, that’s usually caused by a corrupt instances.json

Checking Your Disk Space

On Windows you can rely to your trusty File Explorer to tell you how much disk space you have available (If you know any nifty CMD or PowerShell commands, feel free to shoot 'em my way).

On Linux you can run df -h to check how much space you have available.
Do note however, if you’ve expanded the main partition of an Ubuntu-like distro, you will need to increase the size of the LVM for things to fully register the change. In terms of narrowing down what files are taking up space, you can run du -h /some/file/path or ncdu to check folder sizes.

Updating AMP

Having v2.5 AMP CLI tools and v2.6 instances can sometimes lead to a corrupt instances.json, but either way it’s a good idea to update first and see if that resolves things.
There’s a full update guide here (How to update AMP to the latest version).
Most importantly, be sure to update your ampinstmgr CLI tools.

Restoring the instances.json

Windows

Notes:
By default AMP will be installed on the system’s largest drive, eg C:\AMPDatastore.
Browse to the datastore using the Windows File Explorer, and you should see some files named in the form of instances.json-YYYYMMDD.bak.

  1. Stop the AMP service (borrowing this from another post)

    • Open the ‘Services’ control panel (Win+R → services.msc → Enter)
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    • Find the AMP-ADS01 service (May be called just AMP-ADS), right click it and Stop the service.
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  2. Browse to AMP’s datastore using the Windows File Explorer

  3. Rename the original instances.json to instances.json-prerestore

  4. Find the instances.json-YYYYMMDD.bak file with the newest timestamp

  5. Copy the instances.json-YYYYMMDD.bak file and rename it to instances.json

  6. Run ampinstmgr fixperms in an Administrator CMD prompt

  7. Reboot the computer running AMP

Linux

Notes:
Files/folders prefixed with . are “hidden”, but you can still cd into them and see them with ls -a

  1. Run sudo service ampinstmgr stop
  2. Run sudo su -l amp to switch to the amp Linux user
  3. Run cd /home/amp/.ampdata to browse to the AMP datastore
  4. Run ls to see the files in the directory
  5. Run cp instances.json instances.json-prerestore to keep a copy of the original file
  6. Find the instances.json-YYYYMMDD.bak file with the newest timestamp
  7. Run cp instances.json-PUT_TIMESTAMP_HERE.bak instances.json to restore the file from the backup
  8. To be safe, run ampinstmgr fixperms as root
  9. As your regular user, run sudo service ampinstmgr start
  10. Reboot the computer running AMP

Starting the ADS

If the ADS doesn’t start on it’s own, there’s a few things to try in no particular order.

Linux

To log in as amp, run sudo su -l amp
To log in as root, run sudo su -l

  • Run ampinstmgr version in CMD to see if your CLI tools are up to date. If not, go through the update guide here with extra care to update the ampinstmgr systemt package.
  • Run ampinstmgr restart ADS01 as amp
  • Reboot again and hope for the best

Windows

  • Run ampinstmgr version in CMD to see if your CLI tools are up to date. If not, go through the update guide here with extra care to update AMP’s CLI tools.
  • Run ampinstmgr restart ADS01 in CMD
  • Reboot again and hope for the best