Making a backup of your data is essential to ensure you have a secure copy of your data elsewhere, for example, an external hard drive. Hardware failure and physical damage from natural causes can occur, therefore we advise that you save multiple copies to different locations.

It is essential to have a backup routine in place to ensure that you create backups regularly.

The backup will be date stamped to ensure that you restore the correct backup and do not overwrite previous backups.

The backup process:

 NOTE: If working in a multi-user environment, ensure you process the backup on the server.

Follow the steps below to process a backup.

1. Ensure all users (except the user making the backup) have logged out of the company.
2. Select File...Backup.
3. In the Verify Method frame, choose whether to verify the data you back up. Verify Method gives you two options as below
   • No Checking -This option backs up without verifying the integrity of the data
   • Ensure Files Readable - This option verifies that your data is readable before performing the backup. This option does no internal checking of the integrity of your data. If you choose this option, the system opens a table to display the results of the verification
4. Images - Select this option if you have images (logo for documents or images linked to master files) to include in the backup.
5. Where to back up to - Browse and select the location to save your backup. The system will default to the last folder you used on the previous backup. You can create a new folder if you wish to save the backup in a new folder.
6. Click the Process button to start the backup. If you selected to process backup to a local drive, you will receive the following message. Select Yes to proceed with the backup.
7. Once the back up process completes, the system verifies that the backup is readable. Click OK to start the test operation.
8. Once the test completes, the system displays the backup log. You can print the log by clicking the Print Log button. It is useful to ask the back up operator to print the log as a control mechanism.
9. Close the File Backup screen.

Third-party companies are available to assist with automatic online backups. This software will instruct the system to perform backups at night or after normal working hours. 

 TIP: if you use third-party software to backup, we recommend that you make an initial backup onto the hard disk as per steps above first. You can then backup the backup file. The reason is that the backup function compresses the data into a single ZIP file. This file is far smaller than the uncompressed data.