1) my hard drive crashed

2) I accidentally deleted my database

3) someone broke into our offices and stole our computers

4) I was trying to do something and all my data is gone…

Can you get it back?

Can you get it back?

Can you get it back?

Granted, we like to think we can go miracles and we have some pretty good tricks up our sleeves, but there is nothing like having a quick accessible recent copy of your ACT database at the ready…. just in case.

Here is what doesn't work.

1) you can't just back up the files.  Sure technically possible, but because SQL keeps hold of the files, unless you stop this service, you can't just move and copy the files

2) services like Carbonite really don't' work for ACT.  They don't work for the reason above, but also because they are constantly backing up changes,   So, if you break your database, before you figure out you have a problem, Carbonite is backing up the bad copy of your database.  We have seen cases where the problem is actually made worse because of Carbonite backing up an active ACT database because the user then downloaded the bad carbonate and overwrote and further broke the only working opt they had on their machine.√  Carbonite is great for backing up your backups, but do the ACT backup first.

3) Backing up to a cd. YOu can but you have to know what you're doing.  Restoring can present challenges because the riles are marked read only.

So, Sage, the makers of ACT have a released a tip sheet on the best ways to back up your ACT database.  better than that, you can use the ACT Scheduler to do your backups.

Here is the link http://tinyurl.com/actbackups