#43 Don’t Be a Victim of Inadequate Backup

There are lots of reasons for having to resort to a backup of your data. Among the most popular are:

• Drive Failure and Data Corruption
• Virus Infestation
• Inadvertent File Deletion

Backups are important whether you’re using the Computer-Based or Web-Based version of Advisors Assistant.

Computer-Based Advisors Assistant Users

If your Advisors Assistant database is on your own network or computer, you need to know that many back up programs designed to back up servers and computers do NOT back up your SQL Server Advisors Assistant Database. This includes the
standard Carbonite backup.

Multiple times a year, we hear “I thought I was backed up.” This is why, when we developed a relationship with Gillware Backup, we required that their backup system send an email report to our users telling them specifically when their database was backed up, and file counts of all the other files that are currently backed up. Gillware backup is pro-active because we don’t think that checking that your backup completed last night is the first thing you do each day when you arrive at work.

To find out lots more about Internet backups, click on the Advisors Assistant Help icon and type “Gillware” into the key word index. You can see a sample email report.

Web-Based Advisors Assistant Users

Our Hosted users have their database backed up automatically every evening at Rackspace, and we maintain 14 days of those backups. We also have a service where you can download a Friday night weekly backup to your local computer so you can locally archive many more backups. Each downloaded backup is AES 256 Encrypted and Zipped. You get your own unique decryption key which you can use to unzip the file and store it on a DVD or CD. For E&O purposes, if you ever need to prove you made a note a year ago, it would be laser etched on an archived CD and every archive since then.

For more information about our weekly backup download, give our Sales Department a call at (800) 799-4267.

But even though your Advisors Assistant is being automatically backed up by CMS, you’re storing other valuable files on your local computers, so you should consider Gillware also. It’s designed for business with your data being encrypted before it leaves your computer. You can pick and choose which files and folders you want to back up, so you don’t need to back up everything. You can also find out more about Internet backups by typing “Gillware” into Advisors Assistant’s Help Keyword
Index.

A “New” New Year’s Resolution

Promise yourself that, with the New Year starting, you’re not going to lose a byte of important data and that you will know that your data is backed up. Don’t be a victim!