[AccessD] Backup routines

  Many years ago I was a systems programmer on a mainframe, I ran a 
daily tape backup, rotating the tapes with a weekly backup, then a 
monthly and a yearly. Today I would go with 30 days, and the oldest of 
thirty days or at the end of the month it would become the next monthly 
backup. Yes you need a yearly backup
to possibly restore old financial data or whatever your countries' or 
state's expiration or retention periods are on specific types of data 
(some medical periods are 30 years under state laws). This method also 
allows you to trace back or correct a mistake that may have been made 
months ago.This backup procedure is usually called "grandfather father 
son". Most hospitals have a records officer, so I would discuss backup 
retention periods with them.
Gary is right about offsite backup. I was once involved with a hospital 
that burned down, had to fly in a new hospital that was then reset up in 
an school.
Also at least a couple of times a year test your backup is viable. Not 
much fun finding out your tape drive has been out of synch for 3 months 
and the tapes are unreadable.
Oracle has a 500 page manual on backup practices and methodology.

Gary Kjos wrote:

> You can't back up too much. Anytime a change is made to a database if 
> disaster were to strike, that change could be lost. How big of a 
> problem that would be to redo varies a lot by application. In most 
> cases backing up a database every time an change is made is simply not 
> feasible, so you find a balance between the pain of doing the backup 
> verses the risk of having to redo the changes. Only you and the users 
> of your database can really determine how frequent of a backup is 
> necessary. If you have the disk space - and disk space is relatively 
> cheap nowadays, once a day is pretty good insurance. Now a bigger 
> question might be, how often are those 30 days of backups backed up? 
> What do you do if the drive they are on fails? Or what if there is a 
> fire in the building? Copying those backups off to a CD or a tape or a 
> removable hard drive on a regular basis and taking those removable 
> media to an offsite location or at least a fireproof safe would give 
> you security against a different kind of disaster.
>
> Gary Kjos
> garykjos at hotmail.com
>
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-- 
Marty Connelly
Victoria, B.C.
Canada