Check your backup procedures

[Medlin Software, Dennis]

Friendly reminder... after receiving yet another call from someone who thought backing up on the same computer they were using for live data was good enough. When they had computer issues, their "expert" took money for taking the lazy way out and reformatted their drive without even trying to save the existing data. Imagine, last payroll is due out tomorrow, end of year and 4th quarter forms are not done, and you have nothing other than checks you might get from the bank to try to rebuild (no, they were not printing and saving reports.)

I am sure I have posted my suggestions "several" times, should anyone be interested. Once you feel good about how you are backing up, give a restore a try. If you have never tried restoring, you don't "really" know if you have a working backup - and how to use it.

[rfassett]

Great advice.

Met with a client this morning that uses QuickBooks. This client uses our portal to give us his backup. They upload the backup to the portal and we download it at this end. And he must have had one of those eureka moments because he sat back and said, "So if our computer crashes, you have a backup of our QuickBooks through the end of last month?" I just leaned back in my chair and smiled and said, "yep."

We bail out at least one client every year that calls in an absolute panick. Portals are good.

[Pacun]

Back ups should be done regularly (depends on your business), should be tested at least once a year and a full back up should be kept offsite. Full back up means (in this context) ONLY the database folder for the current year.

Since I only do taxes and on a part time basis, I install my tax software at home and at my two work places. On Feb 14, I make a full back up from my tax computer and copy it on the other 2 computers and test it. I do another similar backup on April 15th(last day of taxes) and in December.

I would feel really bad if my tax computer crashes (let me rephrase that... my hard drive crashes or gets stolen) on the first two weeks of February and on the first two weeks of April but I will survive. Keep in mind that the probabilities of that happening is about two percent.

[Catherine]

Friendly reminder... after receiving yet another call from someone who thought backing up on the same computer they were using for live data was good enough. When they had computer issues, their "expert" took money for taking the lazy way out and reformatted their drive without even trying to save the existing data. Imagine, last payroll is due out tomorrow, end of year and 4th quarter forms are not done, and you have nothing other than checks you might get from the bank to try to rebuild (no, they were not printing and saving reports.)

I am sure I have posted my suggestions "several" times, should anyone be interested. Once you feel good about how you are backing up, give a restore a try. If you have never tried restoring, you don't "really" know if you have a working backup - and how to use it.

Thank you for the reminder!! I backup (on-site and off-site) regularly but have not tested the "restore" feature. Perhaps I should do that _today_ and ensure it works.

[mcb39]

I had the good (or bad) fortune to test my complete hard drive backup a couple of months ago. Computer was doing something quirky and my friendly "helper" suggested that we get rid of some stuff that might be causing it before the tax season started. SO, he wiped her clean and we restored my Ghost backup from a Rev disk and it worked perfectly. Of course, there were a lot of incidental files that weren't there, BUT, everything I do with files, be they tax, payroll, word processing that I want to keep, labels, etc are all backed up individually to Zip, jump or floppy disks. Long story, short........even though I had everything, it was amazing to find how much you would lose on a day to day basis even if your system backup works and your system dies or just gets sick. Because I work in two different places and on three different computers, I am fanatical about backing up, etc. Very good reminder, Dennis. This is one subject that can't be covered often enough.