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Backup and disaster recovery
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Backup and disaster recovery
Computer systems are fallible. Sooner or later something will go wrong. Examples
of what can go wrong include hardware failures (your hard disk becoming
unreadable, your computer crashing, a power failure), software failures (Windows
corrupting your files or simply crashing) and operator error (deleting your most
important database by mistake).
You should take frequent backup copies of your data so that you can restore your
databases if anything does go wrong. If you have recent backups and something
catastrophic happens to your computer you can laugh, go out, and buy another
computer.
With the cheapness and capacity of modern backup media – you can get ten blank
CD-Rs for the cost of a sandwich – there is no excuse for not backing up often. We
back up to CD-RW daily and to CD-R twice a week; and we keep the CD-R backups
forever. You should plan a similar strategy.
We cannot give you detailed instructions for making a backup because this depends
on your system, your hardware, and your software. We can, however, tell you which
files need to be backed up and where they are located.
Before you back up
You should make sure that all your copies of Cardbox are closed before you do a
backup, or at least that all the copies of Cardbox that use a particular database are
closed before you back up that database. If you don’t do this, the backup may fail,
or it may omit data that are stored in memory but have not yet been written out to
the disk.
What files you need to back up
Databases
Each Cardbox database occupies two files. The format file (filetype .fmt) contains all
the format definitions for the database; the database file (filetype .fil) contains all
your actual data. These files always live together in the same directory or folder. If
you’re not sure of the location of a particular database, switch to a Cardbox window
that contains it and use Window > Properties to find out.