We all know we should backup our data and most of us do backups on a fairly regular basis. It is a good idea but most of us don't backup as much, as thoroughly or as regularly as we should. It is human nature to succumb to wishful thinking: "I'm sure nothing bad will happen tonight".
Firms with 20 or more employees tend to have decent backup systems in place. Smaller firms may vary. I get some very unpleasant calls for help from time to time. Yes, I've had my own data problems that meant I had to do hours and hours of rebuilding to get my database back with all its current functionality. In my case my hard drive failed and then my backup drive failed while I was working on recovering from backup.
Do Archival Backups. You can overwrite your backups sometimes, but you need snapshots of your data at different points in time because you may not notice a data problem right away. If you backup over a previous backup and you've got a data problem, your backup will also have that data problem.
Backup offsite at least once a week. You need to have a strategy to guard against fire, flooding and theft. Many businesses go out of business after a catastrophic event that destroys their on-site computer installation, software, data and all. It is just too hard to recover. You can either have an employee hand carry a drive or DVD offsite once a week or pay for a professional online backup service that keeps your data backed up at a data center.
Backup when Studio Manager is closed. If you have FileMaker Server, it can be set to do backups at regular intervals. You can get backups hourly, nightly, exactly what you want. And, FileMaker Server will close your Studio Manager file before it backups up so that all the automatic housekeeping that filemaker does when it closes files is done before the backup is done. Then have your regular backup program backup up FileMaker Server's backups in its regular routine.
If you don't have FileMaker Server, you need to do this closing of FileMaker manually before doing backups. The convenience of having FileMaker Server close your files and do automated backups pays for it right there in most cases.
Backup nightly, weekly and monthly. Here's a suggested backup schedule: daily keeping the last weeks worth of days, weekly, keeping the last six weeks, monthly keeping the last six months. It is not unusual to run into a data problem that is subtle and goes undetected for more than a couple months before you realize you have a problem. It is good to have your weekly and especially monthly backups both onsite and offsite.
That's all there is to it. Make it easy on yourself and get religious about backing up your data.
