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Important Backup Information

You Must Back Up

--WHY?

All disk drives fail sooner or later, and when they fail there is NO WARNING.

It is critically important that you make provisions to backup your VersaForm data so that you can recover in the event of a failure. You must protect your information from a hard disk or machine failure or a catastrophic event such as a fire. To do this, you must perform regular backups that copy your data to a removable device such as a CD, tape, or removable disk.

You can do this using the Windows Backup program but you may want to consider one of several commercial backup programs that have advantages such as:

  1. Better user interfaces for selecting files to include in the backup.
  2. Support for a wider variety of backup media.
  3. File compression.
  4. Media spanning if the files are too large to fit on a single tape, disk, or CD, or DVD
  5. Built in scheduling for automating the backups.

There are a number of good programs on the market for under $100. For example, you might consider NovaStor Backup, Avantrix Backup Plus, or NTI Backup Now. Cobian Backup is free.

Backup Strategy

Your backup strategy should:

  1. Use multiple media--you should have more than one copy.
  2. Rotate the media--don't backup on the same media twice in a row.
  3. Keep at least one copy off site. That way, if there is a fire or flood, you will still have a backup.

For example, if you use removable disks and make a backup every night, you should have at least six disks. Each night for a week the backup should be done on different disks and each Friday you should take the disk home and swap it for the previous Friday backup. It is very important that you use multiple backup media, rotate the media, and keep regular off-site copies.

If this seems like too much trouble to you, think hard about what you would do if your machine died or your building caught fire and you lost all of your data.

Professionals even test their backups by periodically restoring to a different computer. (Restoring to the same computer is very dangerous).

Loss of data is not a common occurrence, but it does happen. If you have not planned for backup and recovery before data loss happens, you may find it impossible to recover your information.

What to include in your backup

You should backup to removable media the files kept in the BACKUP directory of your VersaForm Server station. It is not necessary to backup anything on your VersaForm Client stations. If, for example, you installed in the standard location, you should include all of the files and subdirectories on the Server station in:

C:\Program Files\VersaForm 3.0\CPRDB\BACKUP

If you are short of space on your backup media, you may, instead of backing up the entire backup directory, back up only the files written since the last backup, as explained below.

Partial Backups and Compression.

If you are short of space, one way to minimize the amount of data included in one operation is by compressing the backup data on your hard disk into a zip file. You can get a trial version of the popular WinZip program at www.winzip.com. As an alternative (or perhaps in addition) you can copy only the backup data for a single day to the removable device. As previously mentioned, the backup files are in subdirectories of “install directory”\CPRDB\BACKUP. As an example, assuming that you installed in the standard location, your backup directory would look like this:

C:\Program Files\VersaForm 3.0\CPRDB\BACKUP\MASTER

C:\Program Files\VersaForm 3.0\CPRDB\BACKUP\VF_MASTER

C:\Program Files\VersaForm 3.0\CPRDB\BACKUP\MSDB

C:\Program Files\VersaForm 3.0\CPRDB\BACKUP\VERSAFORM

Each of the backup file names begins with the day of the week that the backup was taken. So, backups taken on Tuesday begin with the letters TUE, Thursday backups start with THU, Friday backups begin with FRI and so on. If you wanted to copy all of the Monday backup data to your removable device, you should select all of the files beginning with MON. If you compress your files before copying you could use the wildcard selector in WinZip (MON*.*) and point to the C:\Program Files\VersaForm 3.0\CPRDB\BACKUP directory. Be sure to select the option to “include subdirectories” so that all of the backup data for Monday would be included. After the compression is complete, you can then copy a single, smaller file to the removable media.