February (01) 2007
Suggested Backup Schedule

Last month I made some suggestions on backing up your data. Here are is a suggested schedule from Peter Reber that could save your bacon in an emergency.

We are assuming that you have a network with more than one computer and that you have installed a removable hard drive that can be taken away from the premises. These drives have reduced in price considerably and are really easy to install - a 200 Gigabyte USB drive can cost under R1000.00 and just plugs into a USB port and a 220 volt power supply.

Use the FIBS programme (or some other Firebird backup programme) that I mentioned last month.
Schedule a backup of your Technisoft data (EXACT, ALCHEMIST or PAYMASTER) to run every one or two hours during work time with the programme set so that it does not perform a garbage collection and with a lower than normal priority so that it does not affect the running speed of the terminal to which it is written.
This backup should be sent to a backup folder on another machine on the network.
Leave about one week's worth of these backups on the terminal.

Set another schedule on FIBS to do a backup at, say, 6.00 pm (after everyone has stopped working) This backup should perform a "garbage collection". About one month's worth of this backup should be retained.

If you are worried about the amount of disk space needed for all of these backups or that you will have to delete older backups, realise that the FIBS backup will perform a 2-stage process:
1) a hot on-line backup using Firebirds backup service application
2) compression of the backup data.

This means that the space requirements for the backup files are relatively small and if set up properly the 'out-of-date' backup will be managed automatically.

Use Windows® Scheduler to run a batch file that will make a daily copy of the backup folder on the removable drive. This drive should be taken off the premises each day.

Check your backups every so often to see if they are restorable, and watch the free space on your drives to make sure there is room for the backups.

Any queries? E-mail me here.

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