Acroprint ATR9800 - Manual (Page 8)

ATR9800 User Guide
6 System Integrity & Backups
RSD
In the last few years, a whole new class of storage devices has sprung up and become very
popular — removable storage drives. While these have existed in various forms for many
years, recently they have taken the market by storm. Their popularity rests in their ability
to provide removable storage at a reasonable price and with good performance. Many of
these drives are also very suitable to use for backups. There are so many different drives,
and they differ in so many different ways, that a complete look at all of them (at least one
that would be fair) is far beyond the scope of this section. The drives fall into several
categories, which we will only mention:
♦
Removable Hard Disk Equivalent Drives
♦
CD-Recordable
♦
Large Floppy Disk Equivalent Drives
♦
CD-Rewriteable
What Files to Backup and How Often?
Ideally, all data files should be backed up at the end of each workday. If this practice is adhered
to, at most, only one day of data could be lost and have to be reentered manually. At the very
minimum, all data files should be backed up weekly.
Program files do not require the same backup frequency as data files because they never
change. They should be backed up when a new version is placed in the system. However, a full
backup of all files makes the job much easier if a hard drive fails.
Acroprint's Data Files
Acroprint maintains numerous data files that are critical for the operation of the system and
to your company's payroll health. All of these files should be backed up daily. All data files
Acroprint uses have the file extension of .DBF and .CDX. They are located in the root of
the ATR9800 directory in a folder called Data. Copying the Data folder will effectively
backup all data files in the Acroprint data directory to the drive of your choice.
The best way to maintain your backup data sets is to reserve a tape for each day of the
week. Each backup tape would be marked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. For each
day of the week, a corresponding tape is used for the new current backup. Reserving a tape
for each day of the week gives you the capability to go back multiple days if necessary.
Suppose you only keep one backup data set and you backed up your data today.
Tomorrow, when you arrive at work, you find that you inadvertently deleted a number of
important records. With only one backup data set, the data you deleted is gone forever. If
you had maintained multiple backup sets, you could go back to the previous day’s backup
data and retrieve the deleted records.