Database Backups

It’s important to protect the data your shop management software generates every business day. While MSEC (SE Connection) backs up your data on our servers, it’s a best practice to also create backup files locally. Regular backups protect you against data loss due to a disk crash, fire, theft, software/hardware failure, accidental deletion, or power fluctuations. Should there be a data mishap of some kind, Technical Support will assist with the restoration of your database and get your business back on its feet with minimal down time.

The screen to configure local backups is under Configurations - Special Maintenance. This backup operation must be performed from the host (Server) PC. Here users can specify when and where the backups of data will be written. Select either ‘At Program Startup’ or ‘At Program Exit’ and then set the backup file location.

The recommended backup media to use is USB Flash or “thumb” Drives as they are reliable, easy to use and take offsite for added protection. Be sure to use more than one flash drive and rotate them to ensure you always have a good copy of the database.

This location should be the drive letter assigned to the flash drive. To quickly find out the drive letter assigned by Windows, insert the thumb drive into a USB port on the host PC. Go to (My) Computer; when it lists all of the drives; you should see the letter assigned to the flash drive here. For example, if your PC already had C: & D: drives, the next available letter is probably going to be E: So you would enter E: in the Location field. That’s all there is to setup. This process copies the data files you would need to restore your database to a location you specified.

Please contact Technical Support should you ever need help restoring your database.

Database Validations

Database Validations have been added to the database back-up screen. The Daily Validation is a quick check against the physical consistency of the database and ensures the ability to stay synchronized with SE Connect (or MSEC) for server side backups and other features. The Weekly Validation is much more thorough and will catch items that wouldn’t normally be found without a thorough review by technical support agent.

This is good for SE shop management systems users as the physical “check-in” will alert them to a potential problem, hopefully prior to any permanent data loss. If a problem is found, a message for the user to call technical support would be displayed on the screen. This situation would not prevent users from working in Manager SE; however, we’d still suggest contacting technical support at the first opportunity.

All users need to do is select either ‘program startup’ or ‘program exit’ as the trigger time. Daily validations run for a moment prior to writing a copy of the SE database to backup media as usual. Weekly Validation requires a Day of Week to perform selection and then you’re all set.