It was a dark and stormy afternoon at the office. The lights flickered on and off before the power went out completely. Panic ensued for several long minutes until the lights finally came back on. In the unexpected glare, a scream rang out in the office…the administrator saw that the server had crashed…

Sound familiar? Major data loss is preventable by ensuring that you have a viable backup at all times. The following are examples of some horror stories reported by our Technical Support Department:

No Backup: You need to restore your data and realize there are no backups for the last several months – no backups in Tabs3, and no third party backups. The third party backup system was set to run nightly, but had not been tested recently so no one noticed that it wasn’t working…

Corrupted Backup: You successfully restore your data, but a Data File Integrity Check or Archive Integrity Check is not run in all programs to verify that the data is error free. Everyone starts working again, reentering missing data as well as new data. Then you discover that the backup had the same corruption you attempted to fix by restoring…

Incremental Backup: You use an incremental backup system. Unfortunately, instead of restoring the last full backup followed by every incremental backup made since then in order, you restored only this morning’s partial backup. Data is still missing, and you may also receive fatal errors…

Don’t be the victim of your own horror story. Check out Knowledge Base Article R11213, “Backup Strategy” for strategies and recommendations for backing up your data, and Knowledge Base Article R10456, “Testing Your Backup System” for information and suggestions for testing your current backup system if you don’t have time. Additional resources can be located in Knowledge Base Article R11524, “Backup/Restore Information Resources.”

Don’t forget HotBackup, which is available in the Platinum version of Tabs3 & PracticeMaster! HotBackups can be scheduled to run at any time of the day, including when others are currently working in the software. For more information on HotBackup and other Platinum features, check out www.Tabs3.com/Platinum or Knowledge Base Article R11193, “Hot Backup Overview.”