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I had a very close shave last night......
I had a self inflicted data problem on my Pricing Software (EstLite), when I went to bed I couldn't see a way back, I do backup regularly but not daily. Luckily I had a copy of it on another PC I had used last week and this morning I was just faced with an hour worth of punching in jobs again .... phew ...
I am now going to take a copy of the database every night and keep it safe, rather than over writing it every night.
BACKING UP DATA IS SO IMPORTANT .... it took me back to my previous life in the City, flying a back office database at a Money Brokers... on one occassion, a mess up on the overnight backup process meant it looked as if we had lost ALL our source code for the London Back Office database ( Developed in house over 12 years ). We managed to recover from it but it aged me a few years over night.
This was a wake up call for me last night, you might want to think how you back up your data at the moment ...
My real name is Adam Laver aka "Adam The Picture Framer", just in case you were unsure ; )
Good tip, I bet a lot of us don't back up enough. I use the Wessex pricing program which backs up every time I close it down. I'm sure Estlite does the same, only problem is ive set it to back up on to the same hard disk I might see if I can back up to my Dropbox account instead, I haven't tried that yet.
As a matter of interest, where do you folks backup your data? I once got an external HD for this very purpose which was very handy until the thing failed. Not an uncommon occurrence from what I gather. Fortunately no real harm done, but it does rather defeat the object if you can't rely 99.9999% on your backing-up repository. I've had frequent manky CDs/DVD's also.
My pc is set up on raid 10, 4 x 1 tb drives, striped then mirrored if one fails everything still runs and that drive is just replaced , then all important stuff is shared via sky drive on 5 different pcs, yes I have had hdd's fail and do not wish to loose data ever again.
Well, I back up data to dropbox, fantastic ( about £6.50 / month for 100Gb "cloud" storage ).
The problem I had was that in the version of EstLite I had been using, the backup was a file Estbackup.zip, although I was backing up to a dropbox folder I see in "My Computer", it was getting over written every night.
I now have sub-folders , Mon-EOD, Tues-EOD etc. (EOD - End Of Day ) which I backup to. However, I notice that v8.23 of EstLite now has a date stamp on it so no chance of over writing it every night, eg. tonights file was EstBackup20_3_13.zip
I think I must learn a little more about computers I have not a clue what you are talking about. I do understand backup but its all the terminology that confuses the hell out of me
"Dropbox" is a file sharing product (the basic version is free) allowing you to synchronise files between computers, it does everthing automatically and is great. If one of your computers fails or is nicked the data still exists on your other machines.
"Idrive" is a backup product (again the basic version is free) which backs up selected drives or files from your computer into "the cloud"*, at intervals set by yourself (say daily). If your computer fails or is nicked then you can copy your data back from "the cloud"
"Salbackupandftp" is a free automated product for backing up sql databases to anywhere you choose, Dropbox or a file to be saved by Idrive say.
*the cloud is a poncy term which just means "on several servers somewhere on the Internet which are themselves backed up and maintained with (hopefully) multiple redundancy built in" you could just think of it as "Internet available remote storage"
I might see if I can back up to my Dropbox account instead, I haven't tried that yet.
Not an uncommon occurrence from what I gather. Fortunately no real harm done, but it does rather defeat the object if you can't rely 99.9999% on your backing-up repository. I've had frequent manky CDs/DVD's also. 
