Backups are an essential part of your daily operation of the system.

N.B. There are many methods available, but as they all involve Hardware and third party Software, Access Accounting cannot provide support for them. However, your Support Provider should be able to give you advice.

Backups can be made to DAT Tape, CD, other Tape devices, external Hard Disks and so on, and can be made using a variety of Software applications. The method chosen will depend mainly on the volume and importance of the data.

You can either use Microsoft's SQL Enterprise Manager tool or the Access Accounts Administrator tool to backup and restore your data. For guidance on the processes for backing up and restoring please refer to the documentation and help within these 2 software applications.

Whatever method you choose, it is essential that you know how to restore from your backup, and it is a good idea to try a restore at some non-critical time, so that when you really need to restore, you are familiar with the process and know that it will work.

The following Backups should be taken :

In addition to the intermediate working backups, it is a good idea to make and keep a permanent Backup of any new Database before you enter any Transactions.

It is also a good idea to make a permanent written note of the name you have given the Database, and where it is held.

Once you have entered any Transactions, there are many things that you cannot change, so without this backup, if you wanted to start again with a slightly different setup, you would have to enter all the static data again. With this backup, you could restore it, make the changes and start again.

You can also make use of copies of this backup, if you want to try something out.

It is essential that you take AND KEEP PERMANENTLY a backup before each Period or Year End on any of the Ledgers. This is in addition to the normal daily backup.

It is essential that you take a daily backup, and that you always have at least the last three generations of each Data file. A sensible plan is to have a backup for each day of the week - thus on Monday, you clear last Monday’s backup and use that, on Tuesday you use last Tuesday’s, and so on.

It is also important to ensure that you are backing up the Data and not the Programs. The name of the current Database can be checked in the About window.

The Database should increase in size, so keeping a note of the size will reassure you that all is well.

It is a good idea to try restoring a Backup at a non-critical time, to make sure that both the Backup and Restore methods that you are using are working, and that you know how to carry out this vital process.

If for any reason you have to Restore from a Backup, all updates and Transactions that have been done since the last backup, will have to be repeated. To help you with this, there are a number of useful features:

You can print the Audit reports to file as well as (or instead of), printing them.

If you have the Import Utility, you can print these reports to file in Importer format, and use these files to rebuild your Data file by importing them.

You can use the Changes feature, to keep a record of the changes that have been made to Records.