Tip of the Month for October 2013

Check your backups on a Daily basis!

  It is important that system administrators or someone be given the responsibility of making sure your backups are working on a daily basis.  Most customers backup automatically at night, and while very convenient, it does increase the risk of backup failures going unnoticed for several days, weeks, or even months, or even worse until you need to restore one.  While most have it scheduled to run 5 days a week, a few may have it scheduled to run 6 or even 7 days a week.  Regardless, it is extremely important to make sure you are getting good backups prior to an emergency or disaster where you need to restore one and find out you have not been getting good or complete backups.

While this is always an important topic worth mentioning, we feel that this is an especially good time for a reminder due to the increased file sizes in a few files in the recent Answers update that most of you installed in the past month.  A few Sales Analysis files are now storing yearly sales figures beyond the original 24 months, up to 10 years.  But the biggest growth in file size this year was in the Inventory Transaction History file (INFIHST) which could grow by as much as 40 times.  This file tracks all sales, returns, receipts, adjustments, and transfer of inventory items so you can imagine how large it is.  Due to a new powerful and flexible search feature that was added to the Nonstock Sales History Inquiry, many additional sort keys were added to this file to improve efficiency and performance while searching. But at the same time, these added sort keys increase file size.  Most servers have plenty of disk space to handle such files, but it is a good time to make sure your backup drives are large enough to hold your ever growing  file sizes.

A similar search feature was added last year to Invoice Detail History (OEFIDTL).  This was the "Search All" feature available in Customer Invoice History tabs and searches.  But likewise this file grew considerably (as much as by 42 times) in size in the 2012 release.

If you are reviewing your backup logs, then any such size/space problems with backup devices such as USB drives or tapes or even on-line backup services, should be noticed as you should see errors in your log.  But if you have not been faithful about checking your backup logs, then now is a good time to start.  If you have your daily data file backups incorporated with the Answers End-of-Day updates, then in most cases the backup log is included right in RUN.LOG that is created each night as an audit of the End-of-Day processing that is done by Answers and Vsi-Fax.

If your backup begins failing because the backup device is no longer large enough to hold your entire backup, you will typically see errors such as "There is not enough space on the disk" or "Reached end of medium" or many other variations depending upon the type of backups you are doing and the backup program being used.  So the main point is just being sure to fully investigate any errors or warnings or anything unusual on your backup logs before you need them and find out there has been a problem.