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June 15, 2005
Volume 1 Issue 8
In this issue:
Maintaining
Database Integrity | Batch
Filing
 From the Editor
Over the last several weeks, we
have spoken with a number of customers who have lost some or
all of their data. If you use a computer on a regular
basis this will probably happen to you sooner or later.
Some of the people we spoke with were
prepared for data disaster, but most were not. If you
are prepared, this is a minor inconvenience. If you are
not prepared, it is usually a major loss of time and labor and
a significant business interruption.
Data loss can occur from accidental erasures
or deletions, data corruption, hardware failure or natural
disaster such as fire, earthquake or flood.
Only one thing can prevent the total loss of your
data: Verified backups. Many people put their trust in
"automatic" daily backups only to find that when they
need to recover from a data loss, nothing usable is on the
backup. Backups should be tested periodically by
restoring them to another drive or computer to be certain the
backup data is really there and is reliable.
It is our desire that your agency be up
100% of the time, so we have supplied some information below
that should help you maintain good data and have
backups ready if you ever have a problem.
Your business relies on The Agency
Advantage, think of backups as your "data insurance".
If you have a question or topic you would
like explained, a story to share, or just a quick useful tip,
we'd love to hear from you. Please send your responses to
mailto:tina@agencyadvantage.com?subject=Response from June
Newsletter.
Tina Stewart
Editor
Preventing Database
Disasters
Data Corruption
Sometimes your data may become corrupt -
unusable or scrambled. This can can be
caused by power surges or interruption of power, improper
shutdown of your computer, out of date operating systems, bad
network interface cards, or terminating The Agency Advantage re-index program
before it completes. Sometimes the source of the problem
is difficult to find.
Lost Data
Lost data can be caused by something as
simple as someone deleting The Agency Advantage database from
your server. Other causes are hard drive failures, and
power surges and brownouts.
Loss Prevention
The number one way to insure against data
loss is reliable backups. In the past tape was the media
of choice, but affordable tape drives were/are not highly
reliable.
Today, portable USB hard drives and even
high capacity memory keys can provide fast, easy and reliable
backup.
Whatever method you choose, be sure to have
the ability to make copies on multiple drives that can be
rotated by day or date. This is important to prevent the
failure of a single backup causing you to not be able to
restore your data.
Be sure to periodically test your backup by accessing the data
to verify that it is valid.
In addition to backups, an Uninterruptible
Power Source on your server and each of your workstations will
go a long way towards preventing data problems caused by power outages,
surges and brownouts
Also, shut off workstations at night and make
certain that your server is re-booted at least twice a week.
Regularly use the Scandisk and Defrag
utilities on your Workstations and server to keep your hard
drive working efficiently.
When re-indexing The Agency Advantage, make
certain all users have exited the program and allow the
re-index to completely finish. Never turn off your
system or CTRL-ALT-DEL before it has completed.
Batch Filing
Do you have a lot of photos on your computer that
need to be organized and attached to customers? Or do you have
a non- TWAIN compliant scanner that you want to use with The
Agency Advantage? If it can scan images to a folder, no
problem! We have a new feature in WinAA that is similar to
Batch Scanning except it loads existing files from a folder on
your computer instead of scanning them.
The Batch Filing Utility can be downloaded
from our website http://www.agencyadvantage.net/
under Downloads and User Only downloads.
Instead of going to each customer folder
individually and attaching a file, you start the
program, browse to the folder where
the files are located and you will then see the files in the
preview just like batch scanning. You can then begin attaching
them to the correct customers. Once finished, post them to the database
and you are done.
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