Actinic Cover for Catalog V9

[btldr123]

Can anyone help and define "Total Protection" last October I received my renewal for actinic cover , the opening line on the contract " We look forward to providing you with total protection for your online store for the coming year"

I am currently having a dispute with support as my contract is up for renewal, and to cut a long story short in July whilst updating new products to the site, I moved the largest section of the database and the database crashed (an ongoing problem with version 9), unfortunately I had not taken a snapshot for a while.

I contacted support and after six weeks was advised that the issue could not be resolved, so I have not been able to update my website since the database crash, as I am manually having to reinput the sections, and as I am also having to process orders this is a time consuming job.

So I feel that Actinic have not provided total protection, and have misold a product, has anyone else had any problems with support, or does anyone know someone who wants some work and reinput the database and get my website back up and running, as currently my google ranking is dropping.

[Mike Hughes]

I have Actinic Cover and I'm not sure I've seen a contract. Maybe that's just me and I haven't looked.

In terms of 'Total Protection' I'm sure every pretty much every form of Insurance / Cover would expect the user to take reasonable precautions to minimise the impact of any loss. By not keeping a recent backup I think you've pretty much put yourself in the position you're in and there's not much Actinic can do about it.

I know I'm not being much comfort but I do feel your anguish as it's a position I'd hate to be in. We never think it's going to happen to us but it does and keeping a recent backup is the only sensible thing to do.

Having said that, there may be someone along who can help you. I know Lee quite likes data entry but he's a talented designer and might not be available.

I hope you get it sorted soon.

Mike

[Duncan Rounding]

How old is your last snasphot?
Does it have most of your products in?
If so then it can be used to create an import file for your current site.

[btldr123]

Thanks for Replies

Hello thanks for the replies, yes I have received a renewal contract which states total protection.

I also have a few other ecommerce websites but not with Actinic, and these are automatically updated daily by the software/webhost companies, so if there is a problem or a crash on the database, this can be resolved very quickly, so I do tend to forget that I have to manually backup Actinic, so hence my last back up was a few months old before the crash, and lots of new products and orders etc had been added to the database, so I did not want to revert back to the old snapshot. Unfortunately support was unable to extract just the personalised candles from the last snapshot and bring in as a CSV file

I do appreciate your responses, but hopefully I will resolve the misleading info or missold product advised by Actinic.

[leehack]

Tina i can feel the frustration you must feel, but you have to face facts i am afraid, Actinic is not an online application and thus protection responsibility lies with you, they cannot setup a backup routine for you or be responsible for what you do on your own machine, how could they do what you expect? Would you hold Microsoft responsible if you lost a spreadsheet or a word document for example, it's the exact same principle. Like a hospital they will fix you up if you break something, they can't stop you walking out in front of a car though.

I think you are also missing an even wider issue in that you are clearly not backing up your overall machine, had you done so, you'd have also had another recovery path. Think about it long and hard, this is your business, you have a massive single point of failure both with actinic and your overall machine. In retail that'd be like not locking up at night and leaving the door wide open only to complain that the police weren't there when you got cleared out.

Have a read of the snapshot tutorial on my site and implement it today and also on your overall machine, you are never more than an hour away from a full recovery then. Strongly recommend using 'dropbox' too, an awesome facility and one everyone should use (its free up to 2GB of online storage).

Best of luck with getting things back, remember you can copy paste from the live site to make it not quite as bad.

[btldr123]

Hello Lee

Thanks for your response, I will check my back ups again as windows 7 is set to back up the office pcs daily to the external drives, and after the loss of data I had tried to reset the pc back to the day before, but could not see that this resolved the issue for actinic software

Yes I am continually copying and pasting from the live site, and then uploading to a test site, but it is just time consuming

Just put this post up to see if anyone could define "Total Protection"

[btldr123]

Hello Lee

Yes I also use dropbox for the suppliers who sell products on the website, and totally agree it is a great software product for mutiple users, thanks for the info re snapshot tutorial on your website, I will defeintely have a read and if I do not have this facility I will uplaod and implement

[btldr123]

Hello Lee

Apologies if I am now hounding you, but with your response, I am now hoping for a quicker resolution and actively looking to see if I have missed something in the overall pc back ups, I had presumed that the pc back up will only back up the last actinic snapshot, or will it back up updated actinic database that was not backed up?

[btldr123]

Hi Lee

Have just tried system restore again and no joy, so hopefully you can advise me to a quicker resolution

[Duncan Rounding]

A system restore will not help.
You need to restore data from a data backup.

What data backup regime if any did you have in place?

You say you have daily backups to an external drive. You should looking on the external drive therefore for earlier data to restore.

[btldr123]

Hello
Thanks, I use windows backup to an external hard drive, this backs up all the files in libraries and personal files.

After another night of trying to see if I can resolve, I will today speak with a chap that helps me with any computer issues, to see if he can talk me through the restore back up feature in windows,

In the meantime I will just continuing copying and pasting from the live site, as I only have a few more sections to do.

Thanks for all the responses

[leehack]

I use Acronis Tina, I schedule daily auto 'complete' backups to a second hard drive on my main machine. I also run a daily one to an external drive permanently connected to main machine. Once a week I run a routine to a second external device, which my wife stores at work. This covers me for all conceivable problems unless my town gets nuclear bombed.

I don't use Windows standard backup options, always found them a bit woolley myself, I prefer the dedicated package especially as it is so cheap.

I also have dropbox which syncs across 4 machines and online for regular day to day files such as office paperwork. I also have my master snapshot folder in my dropbox, so as long as I regularly snapshot, I am again OK. Go over the top in this area, one day you will be glad you did, as most of it is auto anyway, no hassle once setup.

Worth exploring windows restore points and backups just in case they do provide something, go back the furthest you can on both and cross your fingers, I can't offer any advice on that area I'm afraid.

[Duncan Rounding]

Here's a good strating point:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/w...-from-a-backup