Backups

Recently the subject of backups has come up at several sites, so a review of your options may be of interest:

Any NT server needs to be backed up and if you are in an IT department at a newspaper, you likely have a procedure for doing this. This procedure should include your Fax Server(s).

Assuming you do, you should also have someone on site that verifies the scheduled backups are successful.

Some sites have enterprise backup solutions, where one server backs up many servers using some third party solution.

Others have a tape drive in the Fax Server itself that backs up the server it is in.

In either case, special care should be taken with the Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) databases (all of them).

MSSQL databases are not backed up by the NT BACKUP program (nor are any other open files).

Many third-party enterprise solutions will not back the databases up as NT files either, but have an agent or add-on module that deals with them. These are the files with LDF and MDF extensions in SQL Server version 7 and LOG and DAT in version 6.5.

If you are using the NT BACKUP utility, then you need to do the backup in 2 stages:

1. Back up the FaxAction, Master, Model, and MSDB SQL databases to a disk location using the Microsoft SQL Server software (Maintenance plan)
2. Use NT backup to back up the saved files (after the MSSQL backup is done).

This solution works, but requires more scheduling and observation, as well as timing, which gets critical if the databases get large, or the windows are small.

If you need coaching or someone to play the devils advocate on your procedure, don’t hesitate to contact support!