Backing up Actinic

[Licinius]

Can I jump in here please? As a sole trader I havn't got the technical knowledge when it comes to pc's, indeed thats why I bought this program as it does everything for me.

I've had a system crash & had to install v7 business onto a new HDD but having tried restoring with a snapshot I have an 'An error occured while sending merge request' message & my site is offline with an error 500:internal server error message.

I do have my old HDD fitted so can still access the majority of my files, can I simply drag & drop site1 from my old HDD which was working to overwrite my new folder which has errors?

[pinbrook]

I've had a system crash & had to install v7 business onto a new HDD but having tried restoring with a snapshot I have an 'An error occured while sending merge request' message & my site is offline with an error 500:internal server error message.

if you restored sucessfully from your snapshot and your snapshot runs fine onyour Pc I doubt if you will need to go back to the original HDD

The error messages you describe are more atuned to hosting than your PC.

Do a forum search on 'An error occured while sending merge request' to see possible resolutions.

and then do the same with the 500 error.

[Licinius]

Thanks Jo I've just discovered for myself that it won't work lol, was worth a try though.

[chris ashdown]

Try the following

Compact Database

Then go to Troubleshooting under the Help button and try web site purge and refresh, this may well solve your problem

[fleetwood]

As Jo has said, those "merge error" messages are usually server related - and often outside your direct control.
I have found that quite often its worth simply giving it say 20- 30 mins, then try to upload again, by which time whatever was bothering the server may have righted itself.
For some strange reason it sometimes takes up to 3 consequtive upload attempts before the error message clears, so give it a couple of retries, before despairing.

Martin

[Angela]

Thanks for all the replies.

From what's been said you have to do far more than rely on the backup created when you close the program!

Does this backup have any use at all?

[wjcampbe]

The 'create a snapshot' backup prompt when you close actinic is a good way to remind you that you should do your daily backup. The snapshot is also a good first line of defence.

The reason most of the posters here go far beyond that, is that they all have the knowledge and experience that comes from losing several months (or years) of work through a hard disk crash.

If you only keep a daily backup (or snapshot) and you use the same filename, then each day you overwrite the previous day's information. Then on day 4 you find a change you made broke the site, so you reload your snapshot - and it was already broken in that snapshot - you are stuck with making manual changes.

If you have backups for day1, day2, day3...day6 and week1, week2, week3, month1, month2... you can always get back to good data.

Start off with a full backup of the whole data area of your PC including badly behaved programmes like Actinic and Photoshop that try to keep their data inside the programme folders. Then do differential backups (only changed files) for the whole month before doing another full backup on the first of the next month. In addition to that, take the Actinic snapshot as an extra insurance, and once it is done, make a copy somewhere other than your own PC - if you have the space, it's an excellent idea to FTP the copy onto your webspace (you should be able to make a folder on the webspace just for that).

Important step: Test your backups to make sure they work. If you rely on a backup programme that turns out not to be able to read back it's own data - you are worse off than if you had no backup plan to start with.

Expect things to go wrong, work out a plan that would allow you to recover from the worst that you could imagine, then when it does happen to you, the effects will be minimal.

[pinbrook]

yes you are correct, you need more than the backup on exitting the program.

All this does is rotate 3 databases, the current one ActinicCatalog.mdb, previous.mdb and backup.mdb.

The only protection this gives is if ActinicCatalog.mdb becomes corrupt you can fall back to previous or backup.

this covers you for about 5% of any failure scenario.

[pinbrook]

Expect things to go wrong, work out a plan that would allow you to recover from the worst that you could imagine, then when it does happen to you, the effects will be minimal.

This is good advice, sooner or later something WILL go wrong. it could be self inflicted or it could be a disk failure. Someone in this forum has experienced an office fire with no off site backups.

Sometimes you can see disk failure starting, sometimes it just happens!

Consider how far back you would want to go, and build your backup routine around that.

You can see from my plan I only plan to have to go back a max of 2 hours, you may decide 2 days or 2 weeks is sufficient

[fleetwood]

The snapshots mentioned are much quicker to take than I had thought.
I have been used to backing up the full Site1 (a good insurance policy to do at least ONCE a month), but had some crazy idea that snapshots took about 30 minutes and a huge hunk of disk space.
Thats the reason for me butting into this thread, as I was trying to create a 'quick' daily backup routine.
In actual fact, the snapshot I took today took precisely 2 minutes to store the 150MB or to an external HD.
Will be checking out the automatic copy prog Jo mentioned as this seems a sensible way to go. I think a USB flash drive is next on the list of purchases for a quick and portable off site backup. Anybody recomend a good one that offers password protection and/or encrytion?

Martin

[wjcampbe]

I'm currently evaluating this one http://www.genie-soft.com/products/gbmpro/features.html $70.00 may seem steep, but it has a tremendous range of abilities.

[jont]

I use SyncBackup software to take a copy of the site folders and the ACD archives (new archive daily for each site in developer) onto a USB flash drive

Software is SyncBackup from http://www.2brightsparks.com/ this allows for various backup / compare / restore / synchronize routines etc and is often available free on the various magazine cover disks