Hello again SAGE Citizens.
Today I'm going to talk about something very important. The absolute need of good backups. This is one of those things that we all know, (like you should check your oil every week or so, or you should change the filters on your AC system every now and them). , but we don't actually do anything about it because we assume it's being done by someone else or thought we were doing it all along but weren’t..
Does anyone remember their high school drivers-ed class or were required to attend a state sponsored drivers improvement course and they make you watch this terrifying film of what happens when you don't obey the law? I wish I could produce a film on the need for backups showing the terrible implications of losing data but it's hard to dramatically present scenarios like;
A). Teams of people re-entering data over a weekend.
B). Showing up empty handed to an audit because you are unable to produce the required data.
C). Employees standing at the door waiting for their check several days or even weeks late.
D). Enraged expense clerk looking at a receipt for data recovery/forensic services.
So how do we avoid this.
Every company should have a backup strategy in place. A backup strategy must take into account the following factors.
1. what is to be backed up
2. how frequently do we back up.
3. how long do we retain the backup.
4. What is our pruning strategy.
5. what device type are we going to backup up on and with what method.
6.how do we make sure we are doing it right.
WHAT DO WE NEED TO BACK UP?
As this forum is more geared to Abrasuite and HRMS there are two things ideally. For Abrasuite, you will want to create a backup of the data folder itself as this would contain everything relevant and unique to your Abrasuite data set. The does not exclude the possibility that you might be keeping forms and reports in other folders however that is a concept we cannot account for due to the highly customer specific nature of that. For HRMS all the data is on the SQL side. This means you would need to create SQL backups of the LIVE database. (commonly called SageHRMS_live but can have other names) and if you have HRMS SQL PAYROLL you will also need to back up the SYS tables as well as the individual employers. A process can be created on the SQL server automatically.
HOW FREQUENTLY SHOULD YOU BACK UP?
Ideally this would be done nightly so that whatever might happen you would never lose more than a day’s worth of work. The less you use the product the longer you can go between backups.
HOW LONG DO WE NEED TO RETAIN THESE BACKUPS?
this is a highly subjective measurement. The most common practice is a little over a year but this varies depending on the individual’s needs.
WHAT IS OUR PRUNING STRATEGY?
Throughout the course of the year, you will realize that you don't need 365 backups at any given time. What some IT professionals will do is implement a system of nightly backups but after a month of backups, delete all but the ones on the end of the week. . Then after a couple months, just keep one per month and finally after a year or so, just keep one per year. This method does require a bit of forethought and planning but does allow you to have good strategic restore point options and save on storage space.
WHAT DEVICE TYPE AND METHOD OF RESOTRE SHOULD WE BE USING?
This is also subjective and dependent on the product.
For the purposes of Abra Suite the most common device type is a tape drive that runs on a nightly schedule. THE BACKUP METHOD MUST BE FULL NOT INCREMENTAL. Alternatively some lower budget operations without a dedicated backup infrastructure will just make a copy of the data folder to a safe storage drive, then rename the data folder to something like data-03-31-2015.
for the purposes of HRMS data, that mostly gets stored to disk on the SQL server and that too should be using THE FULL BACKUP METHOD INSTEAD OF INCREMENTAL. Once the backups are created the user could implement a tape storage system for the SQL .bak's that creates.
HOW DO WE MAKE SURE WE ARE DOING IT CORRECTLY.
A system can only be trusted as much as it has been verified. from time to time it might be a good idea to make a sure and absolutely good backup of the data and test out one of the restore points either by swapping out the current data folder with a data folder from the prior night or creating a point in time SQL backup of the HRMS data and restoring a SQL backup from the prior night. If you find that your backups have not been working as well as you thought, this could give you the needed forewarning to address it before this leaves you dead in the water.
Normally after an article like this I would express a desire for you to have greater comfort on a topic and not to worry. In this case not worrying is the enemy. You should always be worried about the integrity of your data and the ability to recover it. It doesn’t matter if the need arose from the hard-drive dying out, or a major mistake in a payroll run or like in one real life case a 5 ton steel girder fell from 6 stories onto a small office trailer on a job side flattening out everything inside while the office workers where fortunately out on a coffee break. The computers, water-cooler, chairs and their cute little radios they brought from home where all flattened except for a hardened safe they kept their backup device in.
CELEBRATE WORLD BACKUP DAY WITH ME. BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!!