Chronicle Backups
Good backups are a critical part of your business process. If handled right they give peace of mind. If not, you will be at risk of permanent data loss in the event of a hardware failure.
Your Chronicle system has several different backup processes detailed below. We have designed these backups to keep your data safe. It is critical that none of these processes be impeded in anyway. Any network shares added to these locations or third party software backup processes (local or remote) could interfere with these processes.
Local Database Backup
The database from the Chronicle folder on a local, internal hard drive ( i.e. C:, D:, etc.) is backed up using database utilities to another local hard drive, usually named cBackup, which could be an internal or external hard drive. The data is then restored back to the original hard drive in another location proving the database is good. Seven compressed copies of your database are kept on the cBackup drive, one for each day of the week. The configuration for this backup is:
- Local hard drive to local hard drive (internal to internal or internal to external hard drive).
- If you use external hard drives, use a high quality USB 3.0 hard drive.
The time that it takes for this process to complete is dependent on these factors:
- How fast the hardware is that is hosting this process.
- The size of your database.
This process is the first line of defense against the Chronicle hard drive failure and/or any database corruption. Power failure is the #1 cause of database corruption. In the event the Chronicle hard drive were to fail or the database becomes corrupted, the Chronicle hard drive would be replaced and we could restore the data from the cBackup drive. Some businesses run a RAID 1 or RAID 5 to help prevent these type of failures, which we strongly recommend. RAID systems should only be hardware based, never software based.
Local Document Backup
Each night your Chronicle documents are compared to the documents on the cBackup drive. During this compare any missing documents are identified, then copied from the Chronicle hard drive to the cBackup hard drive. The configuration for this backup is:
- Local hard drive to local hard drive (internal to internal or internal to external hard drive).
- If you use external hard drives use a high quality USB 3.0 hard drive
The time that it takes for this process to complete is dependent on these factors:
- The amount of files that were added since the last Local document Backup.
- How fast the hardware is that is hosting this process.
Remote Document and Database Backup
Each night your Chronicle documents are compared to the documents on the cBackup drive. During this compare any missing documents are identified then copied from the Chronicle hard drive to the network drive (This could be a remote back up location on a server, NAS or some other storage location) to stage your data that you will then need to get offsite somehow. The configuration for this backup is:
- Local hard drive to network hard drive (internal to network shared location)
The time that it takes for this process to complete is dependent on these factors:
- The amount of files that were added since the last Remote document Backup.
- How fast the hardware is that is hosting this process.
- Network speed.
- Speed of the machine the data is stored on.
Additionally, a copy of the restored database is moved to this location to give you everything you need to get back up and running in case of a disaster.
The Remote Document and Database Backup data on the networked shared location is the only copy of the data you should be working with directly. When working with this data, please do not do anything that locks these file or affects our ability the read and write to this location; this will cause your backups to fail. Our support department can provide you with the time that these processes take to complete so you can schedule your own backup processes accordingly. Adjustment can be made to the time the backup starts to accommodate your specific network.
If you are handling offsite backups via streaming to a backup provider like Remote Data Backups, we have had good success with configuring a staging server that has fast I/O. This server accumulates all network data to be backed up, and everything is streamed from this server to your backup storage provider. This will give you the maximum time needed to stream the data without affecting other processes.
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