If you make bad backups for 6 consecutive months and your system doesn’t crash-are you lucky? …or does it depend on whether or not you learn that you’ve been making bad back ups and change your behavior?
As Dynamics Consultants based here in Minneapolis, we try to check clients’ SQL backups each time we go out. It’s not always possible. Sometimes the list of things clients need help with doesn’t fit in the time for ensuring clients are getting a good backup.
More often than we would like to admit, our Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL consultants learn the database maintenance plan has stopped running for a variety of reasons, for example: ran out of disk space, the owner of the backup job had a password change, a configuration change in SQL somehow effects the backup jobs.
In the past year, we’ve had a client lose everything they had in SQL Server (not just Dynamics GP data). We had another client lose only their financial report formats and have to recreate all of the rows, columns, and trees.
Do you monitor your backup jobs to make sure they are running daily?
Do you test your backups to make sure they will restore correctly each month?
Do you know that FRx keeps its data elements in an Access database that also needs to be backed up?
Are you sure your SQL Maintenance Plan is still running for those backups after other software was installed?
If you have a new company created that has a new database, is that database added to the SQL Maintenance Plan?
Do you have an offsite backup?
Are your programs and customizations backed up? Often the programs and customizations take up very little space so it makes a lot of sense to back them up as well.
If you are not sure that you are doing any of these things correctly and you are a Boyer client-please email Jeff Larson (jlarson@boyerassoc.com). …or ask your local consultant to help you with this potentially serious issue.
Synergy Business Solutions another reliable Dynamics SL consulting firm on the west coast has this good post on their blog relating to SQL Server backups. –http://www.synergybusiness.com/project-accounting-blog/?p=33
