Can I merge orders?

[leehack]

This issue pops up once in a blue moon, but is often caused by incorrect backup procedures, as many IT problems are. A utility to merge orders when someone hasn't been backing up and has had a hard drive recovered seems like a very bad idea to me or should i say one that would hardly ever get used. Take the OP, went back 6 months to a working snapshot, 6 months for heavens sake. How can you run a business so poorly protected, if you do, then at some stage things will go tits up - that's life.

With orders and associated invoicing numbers, it's not an area that can easily be merged and it doesn't need to be if you protect your situation with just modest protection methods.

[carbontwelve]

This issue pops up once in a blue moon, but is often caused by incorrect backup procedures, as many IT problems are. A utility to merge orders when someone hasn't been backing up and has had a hard drive recovered seems like a very bad idea to me or should i say one that would hardly ever get used. Take the OP, went back 6 months to a working snapshot, 6 months for heavens sake. How can you run a business so poorly protected, if you do, then at some stage things will go tits up - that's life.

With orders and associated invoicing numbers, it's not an area that can easily be merged and it doesn't need to be if you protect your situation with just modest protection methods.

Ahh yes I see what you mean, this is why I force my clients to back up every day haha. A friend used to work for a company which used tape backups offsite which was useful for when the building accidentally burnt down, meant their biggest investment wasn't lost.

Some of my clients look blankly at me when I ask what their backup policy is, when it is something as important as your bread and butter income it needs to be made safe, and quite often that means making sure you have a back up of a backup which is stored in seperate locations.

My backup policy is:

1x running copy on local machine
1x local backup
1x copy of local backup on seperate local machine
1x copy of local backup on remote server.
1x monthly copy on cdrom for five year archive

All with daily backups and one week rotation. You have to stay safe

[Sean Williams]

I'm amazed at how many of our 'colleague' companies don't backup.
At the end of every day we have
1 x Actinic machine with data
1 x Backup on a RAID NAS on the network
1 x Backup to a portable QNAP device which goes off-site.
Plus, once a day the NAS is backed up and taken off-site on the QNAP.
Plus, Plus, we Snapshot whenever we update the site.
Plus, Plus, Plus, we backup the DB's whenever we update/add product.

Mind you, there's no accounting for idiot fingerwork, like the time a snapshot from one site was imported into a different site. DOH!
Or when some burke deleted a (subsequently discovered to be the wrong) folder using shift/delete, so when the error was discovered (2 seconds later) it wasn't in the Recycle Bin and so file-recovery software had to be purchased and employed

These things only happen once of course.

[pinbrook]

My backup policy is:

1x running copy on local machine
1x local backup
1x copy of local backup on seperate local machine
1x copy of local backup on remote server.
1x monthly copy on cdrom for five year archive

All with daily backups and one week rotation. You have to stay safe

i am a huge fan of online backuo/cloud. you get your offsite copy with no effort. The software i use will do a copy to local 2nd HD and offsite. thus i get more than one copy and maintain offsite. I've gone off backups to tape, cd,dvd, flash as i can easily loose them.

[carbontwelve]

I spent all week thinking I had lost two 2GB camera cards with product photos I had taken for a client, thankgod for cloud backups I would have been stuck until I found them in crevice between the back seats of my car otherwise.

Still when your talking about 3 or 4TB of data to be backed up, local storage becomes expensive and cloud storage becomes infeasable with even todays fast broadband. (even four gig is difficult to backup via cloud...)

[grantglendinnin]

Still when your talking about 3 or 4TB of data to be backed up, local storage becomes expensive and cloud storage becomes infeasable with even todays fast broadband. (even four gig is difficult to backup via cloud...)

You can get 1TB drives for 50 quid nowadays...looking at the cost of backups even just last year, these drives were twice (if not more) that price.

Acronis makes backups so much easier - I just make a ghost copy of each machine on a separate drive periodically. Though I know the risk of a machine melting down one day, it still doesn't prompt me to make daily backups - even after losing 2 months of coursework on a memory stick, with no backups

[carbontwelve]

You can get 1TB drives for 50 quid nowadays...looking at the cost of backups even just last year, these drives were twice (if not more) that price.

Acronis makes backups so much easier - I just make a ghost copy of each machine on a separate drive periodically. Though I know the risk of a machine melting down one day, it still doesn't prompt me to make daily backups - even after losing 2 months of coursework on a memory stick, with no backups

I havent looked at hard disc prices recently, I use raid 1+0 which requires a lot of drives and so has a large initial cost

[Andy@codepath]

Merging Orders

To the OP. Whilst I agree with all the comments about backup procedure and merging orders in this way being potentially problematic if done incorrectly, this is the sort of Actinic database work we do regularly. Please contact me off forum at via www.codepath.co.uk if this is still something you need to progress.

[grantglendinnin]

I havent looked at hard disc prices recently, I use raid 1+0 which requires a lot of drives and so has a large initial cost

Why? I can't think of a single need for Raid 10 for a sme