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Keep your information secure: Make certain you are backing up properly
Daily backups need to be an integral part of your business

It is important to the life of your business that you develop a plan to keep your business information safe and secure.

For this reason, we strongly recommend that you perform a daily backup of your ACCTivate! company file from inside of ACCTivate!.

Why is it important?
Buildings catch on fire, electrical surges destroy hard drives and thieves break-in and run off with computers. All of these happen every day. Are you prepared if one happens to you? Is your data secure?

Backing up your company's data should be a daily business activity. It is very important to backup and safeguard your data each day and remove this backup from your location.

ACCTivate! has a special built-in backup feature File > Backup Company and even allows you to schedule backups to run at night. See the help files (press F1 inside ACCTivate!) for more details.

Formal backup procedure should involve these steps:

1. Establishing a schedule for the backup.
   Backup at least once per day. In addition, more that one employee should be trained in the backup procedure. This will help accommodate a consistent and reliable backup during holidays, vacations and sick days.
2. Get the backup off the system.
   Copy the backup file to a portable media such as a CD or Tape. Then take this backup off-site every day! In the event of a fire it will do you no good to have your backup kept in the same building as the original data.
3. Develop a formal procedure for restoring the backup.
   Keep a consistent rotation of at least 10 tapes (for tape backup only). Test backups periodically to make certain that they work.

Common Question:
Our entire server is already fully backed-up each night on a tape. Do I still have to perform the ACCTivate! backup?

Answer:
You probably still need to use the internal ACCTivate! backup.

Under normal circumstances the Microsoft Windows backup utility will not backup files that are in use. The ACCTivate! database files (Microsoft SQL Server) are always in use. Therefore, you can not use a standard backup utility to backup your server and expect that it will backup your ACCTivate! database. It will skip files that are in use, therefore it will skip your database.

There are some backup utilities that will backup Microsoft SQL server. If you have one of these (and please check to make certain that it works) then you will not have to perform the ACCTivate! internal backup.

Ask your network administrator or a licensed Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer if your backup utility will create a backup that will allow the SQL server database to be fully functional directly from the backup.

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