|
November 15, 2004
Volume 1 Issue 1
In this issue: Database
Backups | Recovering
from Corruption
 Welcome!
This is the introductory issue of our new
monthly newsletter. Our goal is to provide practical
information about using The Agency Advantage in your office.
On the 15th of every month subscribers will
receive their newsletter via email. Each issue will contain
feature highlights and user tips, maximizing the effectiveness
of The Agency Advantage.
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 tina@agencyadvantage.com.
Tina Stewart
Editor
Database Backups
This is an article that should not have to
be written. But, working in the call center, I still hear
stories of customers who 'lost everything'. Just recently I
took a call from a customer whose server crashed. It went
something like this:
"I don't
understand. I changed that tape every night. When I called the
technician to come and restore my backup, he said he couldn't,
that nothing had been written to the tape in more than three
months! He said there was too much data and somehow the
automatic backup stopped working even though I was swapping
the tapes."
Needless to say, he wasn't happy. He ended
up sending his hard drive to a data recovery company, spending
lots of time and money, and still got nothing.
The truth is you must be able to verify your
backups. Can you, or your computer technician, take
yesterday's backup tape and restore critical data right now?
You may be surprised to find out that you can't. My suggestion
is to try it now, while your system is running properly,
rather than after the catastrophe.
Following this advice may save your life,
well, at least your business. If you are using the document
imaging features you will want to review your backup strategy
there to make sure the image storage path is safely backed up
as well.
Interested in better protecting your data?
Look in the Related
Links section for online backup services that provide off
site, guaranteed data backups.
Recovering from Corruption
It happens. The power will go out in the
middle of the workday, your computer may freeze up so you just
cut it off, any number of things can cause The Agency
Advantage to close unexpectedly. 99% of the time this is
harmless. In the event that it's not, here's what you do.
Agency Advantage data files that do not
function as expected are usually corrupted. The first
indicator of this is an error when trying to open the program:
"The required
file 'AAData.mdb' could not be found."
If your drives are mapped and the server is
running, this message likely indicates a corrupt database. The
first remedy is to have everyone close The Agency Advantage,
open the 'AA' folder, and double click the 'AAData.mdb' file.
If your database is corrupted you will be prompted to repair
it.
Supposing that went well, you got a gray
screen that says 'Ready' in the bottom left corner. If not,
you got a message like the following:
"Unrecognized
database format."
Don't panic. All is not lost. If you have
been following the advice of the previous article on backups
then you are fine. Restore the 'AAData.mdb' file from your
backups and you are back in business. If, for some reason, you
do not have a backup, call our support staff. The Agency
Advantage support staff has tools available to them that may
be able to recover your database.
While the support staff should be your first
option, I have provided some websites in the Related
Links section that deal with Microsoft Access database
recovery. | 
