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How to undo a Software Merge

This article describes how to go about undoing accidental or unwanted merges that you've performed using the "Merge Software" functionality in ENT NetCenter.

Article Details

The software merge is a destructive process - it takes two products and turns them into one, modifies all the software installations for these two products to point to the new [single] product and then records an "alias" so that future installations of either product will also be associated with the new/single product. In order for us to make this reversible we'd have to add quite a bit of logging information (which might be possible but would certainly be complex and this functionality doesn't currently exist).

As such, in order to reverse a merge of two products, you'd have to delete all the software installs for both products as well as the alias that maps software installs for each of those products to the "Merge Targe" that you selected during the merge process. In brief, the easiest way to do this is simply to delete the Merge Target (i.e. the product which you just merged any other products into), which will also delete any software installations relating to that product, and to run an audit again... during the subsequent audit you'll get a bunch of alerts telling you about a bunch of "new" software that the audit has discovered (because it found installs on the network which are not recorded in your inventory, you having recently just deleted these from your inventory) and these "new" software installs should again be associated with two separate products rather than one single product.