The Backup Information dialog, available as a choice on the Preferences Menu, allows you to define the Backup Data Path and frequency for CMD database backups. Good backup habits are among the most important habits to cultivate in using a program such as CMD because it is extremely data-intensive, so any loss of data will have a direct impact on your use of the program! There is almost no jam into which you can get yourself that we cannot help remedy if you have a good backup!

The Backup Information dialog remembers and displays the most recent automatic and user-directed backup dates.

Following are the items you can set:

Backup Data Path

Whether generated as an automatic backup, one that you initiate manually, or one that for which you were reminded, you can elect to send the backup to any location you designate, or you can use the built-in backup function that sends all backups to one particular folder that you define. It's the latter path that can be changed either here on this dialog and also on the Configuration Update dialog.

If your create or modify a Backup Data Path from a remote computer that is connected to CMD through the remote database server software, then you should note that any Backup Data Path you create will be local to the host computer, and NOT the remote computer. If, however, you use the option on the Backup dialog itself to send the backup to a different place, you can designate a place on a client computer; however it will be a slow process to do this backup over your network or the internet!

Note: Backups sent to the designated backup folder in CMD can be manually copied to other folders or media once the backup has taken place so that it can be placed on a CD-R for more permanent storage, or it can be copied to a flash drive and taken to another computer using CMD 2015.

We highly recommend that you do NOT depend solely on automatic backups. While they provide something better than nothing for a backup, should your whole computer go down or your hard drive fails, these backups will be of no use to you! Do not depend solely on the automatic backups!

Backup Frequency

There are 4 triggers built into CMD that will trigger a backup reminder when you get ready to leave CMD after any one of the triggers has been tripped. When you respond to a trigger to make a backup, each of the internal trigger counters are reset.

•Number of Records Added. You can dial in a number that will trigger a backup reminder whenever a certain number of names have been entered. This will keep you from entering too many names without making a backup for safety. We recommend a number of 25.

•Number of Sessions. You can tell CMD to remind you to make a backup based on how many times you have started up CMD. This counter is incremented each time you start up CMD, whether or not you make any changes to your data. We recommend a number of 10 to 15.

•After Deposit Register is Printed. This trigger is for those users who make regular user of the Contributions Manager. Most users will print a deposit register to go with each new batch of donations entries. We strongly urge you to make a new backup after each session. That way if a problem develops during the year, you'll be able to step backup by week until you are able to start again with data that's clean.

•Day of Week. You can set CMD to remind you to backup your data whenever you exit on a given day of the week.

We suggest that you set several of these to make sure you are adequately protected.

This may seem like overkill, but we know of too many stories that have been told to us over the years - stories that would all have had different endings if good, regular backups were made. Please take regular backups seriously!!!!!!

Backup Files Location

As noted above, CMD backs up its files either to a designation of your church (which results in a standard zip file), or to the designated folder built-in to your CMD's data engine. By default, that location is a folder named C:\CMD2015 Data Backups. Note that it is created right off the root of your C: drive so that you can get to it easily. You can change the location where the backup files are sent either on the Configuration Update dialog or the Backup Information dialog.

Special note: if you wish to change the location where the backup files are placed and you are using CMD 2015 with the remote database server software, then you should make any changes to the backups destination folder on the actual computer that is hosting CMD's data. The location of the backup files is always relative to the host computer. Even when a backup is initiated on a client computer, the actual backup is sent to the folder designated in the configuration relative to the host server (and not the client). That means that you cannot create a backup file on a client that ends up residing on the client computer. It will always go to the designated folder in the CMD Configuration relative to the host computer.

Best Practices for Backups

While we create the C:\CMD2015 Data Backups folder by default, our best suggestion is that you do not leave this as your regular backups location. We highly recommend that you have an external hard drive directly connected to the host computer, and that you create a backups location on this external hard drive.

If you cannot obtain an external drive, then the next best suggestion is to copy the backup files from the C:\CMD2015 Data Backups folder to a flash drive or CD-RW at least every two weeks when the auto backup is done. If you do not have backups on different media than your hard drive, if you have a crash, you will not have any data to restore! Make sure you offload the backups occasionally if you do not have an external hard drive onto which CMD can place its backups.