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[EricCech]

Hi - I'd like to set up a fool-proof backup method, meaning that if I've got no one very 'computer literate' available, and we have a hard drive crash, do you have a suggested means of backup?

I'm thinking RAID 1, OR have a USB hard drive attached which is bootable, which is getting nightly copies of the SM database and Dazzle on it. The idea being that if the primary drive fails, one could simply enter the BIOS and reset the drive order.

I'm not sure how this works with RAID 1 - apparently windows 7 Pro had this as a feature (Windows 8, which has unfortunately appeared on my new computer, has something called 'drive spaces', which seems more of a Microsoft debacle   ... OR, it seems possible to simply install Windows on the USB drive, and have backup software again wrote backup copies of SM and Dazzle DB's on it.

One other question - is there any issue of making a copy of SM's DB IF it happens to be making a duplicate at that time itself?

Cheers and Thanks,
Eric

[David Johns]

Eric,

Good questions.  Honestly, I'm not the best authority on RAID and other backup technologies.  What you are describing with either RAID or software-based solutions like the one Microsoft offers or even cloud-based solutions like sugarsync, dropbox or others should work fine.  I think SuperManager's approach should make it pretty easy for any backup device tp work with.  Here is the approach it uses:

1. Save the current database to a temp file
2. If the save is successful, move the temp file to overwrite the current file on disk
3. Make a copy of the file as the backup file

Using this approach there is very little time that the operating system actually is writing to the smg or sbk files themselves, which I think would make it unlikely that RAID or another software backup solution conflicts with SuperManager accessing the files.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
David