Thursday 31 March 2011

Backing up your data

 

Data backups are often overlooked. It is vital that you make regular backups of your data to protect against virus infection, hard disk failure and computer theft. All three of these have happened to some our customers at some point.

What do I need to backup?

At a minimum, you need to take a regular backup of the ColorPoint Manager database. the CPM database backup is found in C:\SqlBackup\CPM\. Backing up the most recent file to a USB flash drive ensures that we can recover your system in the event of failure or theft.

The files are date stamped and rotated by the backup scheduler. There should normally be 7 backups named ColorPoint.Manager_Full_date_time.bak. If your computer was switched off when a backup was meant to run (03:00) there may be one or more missing. Ideally you want these backups to be made every day, so if needed contact Rexson support to have the scheduled time changed.

If you look in the backup folder and there are no backups, or the newest ColorPoint Manager backup is older than 1 week old (date format yyyymmdd, e.g. 20110331) please contact Rexson support immediately.

What else should I backup?

If you have other software installed on the ColorPoint Manager PC, e.g. spectrophotometer software, Word, Excel, it will be important to backup those documents too. It is beyond the scope of this article to tell you how to back up the other data on your system. Please check with your IT department and spectrophotometer manufacturer for guidelines on what to backup.

If in doubt it is worth using an external hard disk and using the Windows backup program to perform a full system backup on a regular basis too. As long as the hard disk is as large as, or larger than the hard disk on the PC you will be able to make a full backup.