Sage 100 Backups are Critical
Let’s start with a real story in which the names of the involved parties have been changed to protect the innocent. We had a client several months ago being told by their IT group that their mission critical data was routinely getting a backup and it was happening every night. At one point they were infected with a virus on their system due to some outside connectivity (remote work). The first sign of trouble were error messages in Sage 100 about space constraints and a lack of reports. It turns out their data files had been compromised by the virus. Once they called the IT group, it took several days to do a restore and, as is sometimes the case, the data backup process had been failing for about 1.5 years due to a lack of oversight.
So there was no good restore point and no one in the business responsible for checking the work of the IT group and ensuring that the backups were being done correctly. This customer ended up losing over one year of data. The cost to the customer has been much higher than the cost of backing up data correctly.
This is why it is so important to check with your own IT group and make sure that you are getting both a data backup and a system file backup.
As a result of this experience, we have some real world recommendations that we now provide to all customers. These recommendations are based on the “3-2-1 rule”. This rule says to keep 3 copies of your data on 2 different devices with 1 off site storage solution. For example, if your main server is at your HQ location and then there is a cloud backup along with a NAS drive, this scenario would satisfy the 3-2-1- rule.
Let’s dig into some of the details…
Offsite storage: Always try to use an off site storage solution. It’s really inexpensive to do cloud backups and that is what we recommend most of the time. If a cloud backup is not possible, you would also use another physical copy of your data on an external drive that is stored off site. Both offsite storage solutions would protect your data in the event of a natural disaster
Backup schedule: Backing up your data on a regular basis is very important. If you're not doing it on a regular basis, but doing it infrequently, then it makes it harder to retrieve that data as a proper restore point. We recommend that backups are set up on regular intervals, preferably nightly. This ensures that everyone is logged out of Sage 100 and you have a solid backup. Sage stresses that if you're going to use a backup, it needs to have a current restore point and be what is called a full backup (as opposed to an incremental backup).
Think about endpoints: If you do not have the means to pay for a service to backup your data through an IT provider, you can purchase an inexpensive external drive if your installation of Sage 100 is not too large. Both solutions work although the inexpensive external drive is much more manual. Specific to Sage 100, you can make a temporary backup. Sometimes this is done through company maintenance and we have provided these instructions to our customers on several instances (along with training).
Alerting: Always make sure that you understand whether or not your data backup solution is working. We have many customers that receive an email confirmation on a day to day basis about successful backups. This is a great way to make sure everything is running correctly.
Over the last year we have seen a large increase in system infiltration via viruses, malware, and remote work activities. We just want to make sure that if you're putting this much time into your business, that you're also putting the extra funds into making sure that you have a good backup. It is far more costly to invest in restoring data that has been effectively “lost” due to poor backup hygiene.
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