Rick Bunzel
03-15-2012, 07:27 PM
Apparently sometime Tuesday night-Wednesday morning Microsoft did a major update to Windows. ON Wednesday we opened our office, woke up the computers and start our Inspection software which proceeds to puke, alerting us that the Datebase is not recognized and probably corrupt. My partner/wife announces that something is wrong and seeing that message I encourage her to call the tech hot line and see what they say.
My partner/wife calls tech support and the tech says that if can't start the software the compact/ repair function isn't going to work (so why is it there??) and we should just restore the "backup copy." Great where does the software store a copy of the database file? The tech says "where-ever you put it""??? At this point I get handed the phone. I foolishly believe that software developers have a copy stored someplace to protect us from ourselves, so I too ask where they store it. The tech says nope we don't do that but I am sure you do.... At this point I realize they aren't going to be of any help and sign off. We do have a daily backup that runs every night, so I copy the last backup over to our working directly and my partner/wife starts to breath again.
The moral of the story is that if your not doing automatic backups you are going to learn the hard way that when you least expect it, your most important files are going to crash on you and your going to lose data that you run your business on. Our database has 5 years of client data in it. In our backup strategy we have a daily backup, a monthly backup to a different location, a quarterly backup to a USB drive that lives in a safe location after the backup is completed AND a yearly backup to DVD disks that get stored in a safe deposit box. If things go terribly wrong I know that I am going to be able to get my business back up and running pretty quickly with minimal loss of data.
You can't backup too much!
//Rick
My partner/wife calls tech support and the tech says that if can't start the software the compact/ repair function isn't going to work (so why is it there??) and we should just restore the "backup copy." Great where does the software store a copy of the database file? The tech says "where-ever you put it""??? At this point I get handed the phone. I foolishly believe that software developers have a copy stored someplace to protect us from ourselves, so I too ask where they store it. The tech says nope we don't do that but I am sure you do.... At this point I realize they aren't going to be of any help and sign off. We do have a daily backup that runs every night, so I copy the last backup over to our working directly and my partner/wife starts to breath again.
The moral of the story is that if your not doing automatic backups you are going to learn the hard way that when you least expect it, your most important files are going to crash on you and your going to lose data that you run your business on. Our database has 5 years of client data in it. In our backup strategy we have a daily backup, a monthly backup to a different location, a quarterly backup to a USB drive that lives in a safe location after the backup is completed AND a yearly backup to DVD disks that get stored in a safe deposit box. If things go terribly wrong I know that I am going to be able to get my business back up and running pretty quickly with minimal loss of data.
You can't backup too much!
//Rick