(NOTE: This is a repeat of what was sent to the ACE-LIST a couple of weeks ago.)

I was at dinner a few weeks ago with some brilliant developers from around the world. We were talking about database disasters and how to recover from them. Let's face it:  Bad things happen from time to time. Someone said a phrase that got me excited: Monthly Recovery Test.

 

All of you reading this should have someone in your office who does backups of your data on a regular basis. (If this is not happening, then you need to start!) Several people at my table shared horror stories of corrupted backups and not having a usable one for months on end. In fact, this very thing happened to an ACEware customer. So the proposed solution was this idea of testing backups to see if they are indeed viable.

 

There are two procedures to test if you can restore from a backup. In either case, you need to assume that the entire Student Manager server has died. Here are the two scenarios:

Assuming you are able to restore the backup in either one of these scenarios, then you just need to log into Student Manager to check whether the data you expect to see is actually there. Only the latest data should be missing. If this were not a test, then you would need to manually reenter this missing data.

 

As I write this, another thought comes to me: How often should backups be created? As you can see from this, you are going to have to recreate whatever data is missing from the last backup to the date you are recovering. If you are willing to reenter months of data, then you should make a backup about once a quarter. If you are only willing to reenter the last hour of data, then you should get everyone out of the system every hour and make a backup then. (Okay, this last sentence is admittedly a bit extreme, but I think I've made a good point.)

 

I think that some of you might think a monthly test of your backups is too often for your organization. Maybe doing recovery testing once a year is enough. But, again, you need to ask yourself how much data you're willing to lose. I don't think doing a recovery test more than once a month is required. I also wouldn't recommend anything less than once a quarter unless you are a Summer School or something that only has one registration period a year. In any case, you should do a recovery test as soon as possible and figure out a schedule going forward.

 

Something I haven't mentioned to this point is ACEweb. There isn't a real way to backup ACEweb other than copying your INI files and template files out from time to time (usually any time there is a change to any of these files, which shouldn't be too often). In a real recovery, you would need to reinstall ACEweb from scratch. This would not be very feasible for recovery tests since this can be cumbersome. But ACEweb doesn't have data and data is really the key to your business.

 

Another item up for discussion is that, even if your IT support team is doing server backups, you might still want to consider doing a backup from within Student Manager. This puts less of a burden on your IT team for these recoveries and doubles your insurance.

 

Contact your technician if you need any advice or to get the install file if you need it for your recovery (either as a test or if we are in an emergency situation). Unfortunately, your technician is going to be too busy to help with these recovery tests, but we will be documenting this procedure in the Online Help during the next update cycle. Don't worry, you'll be able to do this on your own. Happy testing!