[FMucklo]

How is everyone doing backup of NV2 books? With a 35 meg NV1 file folder I used to use Winrar and compress it to about 4.5 megs and then upload to online storage. The NV2 folder now is much larger and also contains backup folders generated by NV2. The files are now to big for my old solution and uploading to online storage would take too long. I’m now backing up to a usb flash drive but I have to overwrite the files on the drive each time because of the room necessary. I no longer have day by day backups. I do burn a of the complete NV directory once a week, but I notice that I am approaching almost the limit of the CD. I may have to switch to DVDs. These I store in a fireproof vault but am not as comfortable as with uploading to off site online storage.
How are you doing it?

[HMah]

One can never have enough backups, but how many and what will vary.

We recommend backups daily using and External source (zip, cd, usb or another hd) rotating 5 disks, as well as internal copies to other directories. In addition a Bankrec backup should be made everytime it’s reconciled. An external out-of-office should also be made (min weekly).

[Randy Walton]

I have 3 customers each using different methods:
1. DVD burner
2. 512 mb USB Flash drive
3. 3 – 80 gb External USB Hard Drives

With the DVD burner we are backing up all data folders, NV2 data folders and NV2 workstation folders using Windows XP Pro Backup utility to compress and write the backup file to a DVD-RAM formatted DVD. Five DVD’s are rotated daily and are taken off site every day.

With the USB flash drive we are just copying the NV2 data files/folders and workstation files/folders to the flash drive. We are only backing up once a week and so the files are overwritten weekly. This isn’t the best solution in my mind in the event of data loss but I suppose it is better than no backup. Purchasing multiple Flash Drives would be a better idea but I personally like the third solution.

With the external hard drives – 2 of them are connected to the server at any given time. Drive 1 has a daily backup of all data files as in solution 1 using Windows backup to compress and write the backup file to the drive. Each day the file is named with the date so that multiple daily backups exist on external drive 1. Drives 2 and 3 are swapped weekly and the disconnected drive is stored off site. These drives have a weekly compressed Windows Backup of the entire system and multiple copies exist on the drive. To date more than 3 copies can reside on these weekly external drives – so we are deleting the oldest file before each weekly backup. This gives us approx. 1.5 months of backups. The daily backup which is never disconnected is storing 7 copies and again we are deleting the oldest file before each backup.

In all of these solutions we are not using incremental backups, instead we are scheduling the backup to run at night and performing a full backup each time.

The one thing I have just realized recently that we are missing in solution 1 and 2 are any NV2 template files that are created along side the existing NV2 templates.

[Author]

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