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It's time to discuss a very serious matter, Backup. If you're not backing up your datafile you're asking for major trouble. Let me give you some painful examples.
One of our fellow PrintPointers called early one August morning reporting a loss of data issue. A large number of their job records were missing however, the jobs were in the list the day before. It turns out someone had accidentally deleted the jobs. My initial response was to restore the previous days backup since that data was good and only a couple of jobs from this morning would need to be re-created. Their only backup was from the previous month not the previous day. Now they had to manually re-enter all the lost data and hope they didn't miss anything.
Another user launched the PrintPoint Server Application and accidentally selected their backup datafile as the active file. This caused the data to not get backed up because the automated backup program was trying to save the data to the exact file PrintPoint was already using. When this file got corrupt a few weeks later, they did not have a good backup to restore.
Just to drive the point home, I want to relay a positive story of a successful backup strategy.
We have a user that was upgrading versions of PrintPoint. The first thing the user did was to make a backup of the data so he would have a good copy in the event that something went wrong during the upgrade process. Of course, during the upgrade process, the server application was accidentally shutdown before the update process was complete. This caused the data to be corrupted. However, this user had a backup plan that included backing up the data every evening then copying that backup to two separate locations. They even went as far as making a copy on a removable medium so they could have a safe copy off-site in the event of a fire or flooding to the printshop. This comprehensive backup plan saved the day for us. We were able to restore the data and complete the upgrade without incident.
So you see, it's not just the process of backing up, but having a good backup strategy that is periodically monitored and verified that's important. In the technology industry the saying is "No matter how good your backup plan is, it's not good enough".
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