Backup Backup Backup

Welcome to my blog. I intend to give you all, my readers some tips and tricks that I learn along the way. For any of you who know me, it should not surprise you that I am going to start with Backup. I am kind of a backup freak. And for good reason, let me explain. I will not use names, to protect the innocent, but these are all real stories that happened, just this week.

First, I have a client whose database was corrupted. In January we fixed it all up and sent them on their merry way. We set the database to automatically backup. I made sure to tell the IT guy to be sure that the folder that we were backing up to, was also backed up. Unfortunately, they had a hard drive fail and the folder had not been backed up. The only backup they have is from before we did the work to fix the corruption, so not only do they lose the data for the past few months, we have to do the corruption fix again.

Second, one of my clients called. I installed ACT! a few months ago on his speedy new computer. Apparently, speedy new computers crash too. He called me earlier this week to tell me that he is getting a new hard drive but the last backup he has is from February 19. He had an external hard drive but forgot to plug it in, so no backup since February 19. He has lost 2 months of work.

Third, and most confusing is a story of one of my clients. She has an older version of ACT!. She was working yesterday and received a Fatal Error from ACT!. She closed it down. She called me and we spoke this morning. I opened up her database, but something didn’t look right to me. It wasn’t. This was an old database, probably over a year old and it hadn’t been touched. I am not sure what happened, but her database was gone. Thankfully, she made a backup to her hard drive 3 days ago. We restored that one and she was on her way. She lost a few days of work, but nothing too serious. Thank goodness!

On another day, I will tell you about when 2 of my computers died on the same day. Until then, please backup your database. Please also have a backup of the files on your computer. You can backup to a flash drive, an external hard drive or use a subscription based program that backs up your files each night. Or, you can use all of those, like me. More on this topic soon.

What are your backup stories? Successes? Horror Stories? Feel free to share with the group.