hypothetical but... complete restart

[Mr Questions!]

Just supposing the worst case scenario - someone breaks in and steals my PC which holds my Actinic Store.

How can I protect myself so that I could rebuild my store reasonably simply should that occur?

What sort of hard copies should I be making? At the moment I make CD copies of the site and the whole Actinic program but wouldn't know what to do with them to be brutally honest!

Thanks

[NormanRouxel]

Making regular Snapshots and keeping them on separate media is all that's required.

For a belt-and-braces approach I also do the following. Go to Housekeeping / Security and copy/paste the info there to a text file that you keep in Site1. This is the only critical info that isn't in ActinicCatalog.mdb, or elsewhere in Site1.

Now a simple backup of the Site1 folder and all it's sub-folders will also help you recover the site should the Snapshot fail.

If you keep your images in a folder(s) outside of Site1, then back these up too.

Should disaster strike you are now well prepared and can always get help on the Forum on how to restart everything.

Incidentally this Forum is, unfortunately, littered with "I never bothered to back-up and my hard disk just died - what do I do" posts. The invariable answer is; start redesigning from scratch, perhaps spending several days copy/pasting the text and prices from the live site, one-by-one, back into Actinic.

[jont]

I always create a new snapshot with a different name each day - never overwriting yesterdays just in case of corruptions and to give greater flexability to roll back to a specific date. With the cost of CDR's being pennies there is no issues in having a daily backup for each day of the year.

It also worth testing the snaphot function is working correctly from time to time to check for any errors - needing a snapshot in the future and only then finding it is corrupted is worse than having no backup at all.

[NormanRouxel]

A great way to test if the Snapshot works is by installing Actinic on a spare PC. Now try restoring from the Snapshot on that system. If it works as expected you have an instant hot-spare ready and waiting for the day disaster strikes.

[pinbrook]

what version of winzip will unzip an acd?

has anyone sucessfully used 7zip to unzip acd?

[jont]

what version of winzip will unzip an acd?

Version 7

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=19683

[Mr Questions!]

Cheers Norman

You pretty much said what I expected but nice to be re-assured and, as you said, I don't want to be one of those "I never thought it would happen to me" guys.

Joe

[jont]

I am using 8.1 SR1 without issue

Alas Stuff-it does not appear to recognise the file

[pinbrook]

For the record 7zip (open source) will extract an acd.

i've got v4.40 beta, it extracts and allows you to manipulate resultant files

[Stereo Steve]

I keep snapshots on CDR most days and occsionally upload Site1 to secure webspace. You should keep a fairly recent update off-site really.

[PA.com]

I agree with everything Norman and Jont have said regarding the standard backup procedure but I would add the following. I have before now had to modify files in the OCCUpgrade folder which exists higher up than the Site1 folder. As a result I tend to backup everything under the generic Actinic v7 folder, which includes the backup snapshots and so on, so I could theoretically transplant the whole folder onto a new computer.