Hello everyone.

Welcome back to work and welcome to 2009.

I had a great holiday with my family and (as hinted to by Mariano) went on a cruise to Vanuatu and New Caledonia in the South Pacific.  We managed to catch up with family on both sides of Australia (in Sydney & in Perth) for Christmas.  Sadly, the break was not perfect as I had a throat infection between Christmas and New Year and got nothing done.  Oh well, I am fine now and look forward to an exciting year in the Microsoft Dynamics GP community.

The blogsphere has been a little slow over the holiday season, but there are a few new articles coming now.  One article that caught my eye was Backup, Backup, Backup on DynamicAccounting.net.

This reminds me of a great story from my consulting days..... 

We had inherited a Dynamics site from another partner and while we were discussing the site with the customer's IT Administrator, he asked why the system backups to tape were still taking the same amount of time as when the system was installed 3 years ago.  After a short investigation we found that the backup system had been set up at the time of installation to dutifully backup all the databases in the system.  So we had 3 years of backups of the DYNAMICS and TWO databases and nothing of the actual company databases which were created later and never added to the backups.  This was rectified immediately.  Luckily, they had never needed their backups during those 3 years.

While on the subject of backups:

• Backup often and make sure it contains the data it needs to. Ask yourself "How much are you willing to lose?". 
• Make sure that you backup onto multiple tapes in sequence and not always the same ones.  You never know how far you need to go back to.
• Verify the backups.  Make sure that they can be read back. Restore failures don't help.
• Store backups offsite. Just in case something unexpected happens, like fire.
• Don't do what a customer of mine did once.... After a data error occurred, backup a corrupted system over the top of their one and only good backup.

To misquote a wise little green master: "Hmmm, Back up or not Back up. There is no try."

David