Backing Up And Copying Files With Aurora

[Scott Kinnaird]

No, Joseph, what I said is our support and development executives won't be spending their time defending our company's motives or integrity. That's my job. Their job is to help people with their software problems. I will respond when your comments aren't accurate. They won't be. So, I'm responding. But, I'm going to make this short and to the point.

Document 4303 was written by one of our many tech doc writers. The document wasn't accurate and when it was discovered, it was corrected and re-posted. We have literally thousands of support documents we maintain. It's an ongoing process to keep them updated and relevant. Any reasonable person who's actually performed a task that complex understands what it's like. That's enough time spent on the tech doc issue.

The Apex upgrade issue has been addressed many times and in much more detail than I'm going to go into this late in the game. But it's actually very simple.

Most software companies don't support older versions of their products forever, for obvious reasons. Everyone knows that. Apex and a la mode are no different. Apex v3 has a much better integration with WinTOTAL - it transfers room counts, allows for a network license, has a more integrated look and feel with Aurora, is more reliable, etc. All things their customers and our customers have asked them and us to do for years. Like ALL software upgrades, when these things don't behave the way they did in the old version, it generates customer support calls that we pay employees to receive and handle. Sometimes it's not even our problem, but we take them anyway. It's the cost of doing business.

Apex deserves compensation for creating these new features. It would be nice if they could give it to you for free or if we could give it to you for free, but Apex is not a non-profit organization and neither are we. And, you better hope we're not. There are plenty of software companies supporting old technology and not bothering to innovate. We don't intend on being one of them.

The current situation with Apex v2 and Windows XP SP2 just puts an exclamation point on why companies have to upgrade their products and not base their current versions on old technology. Apex v2 routinely fails to create the image WinTOTAL needs to display and print your sketch. We receive dozens of support calls on this one issue - every day. I think you would agree it would be more productive to have those support reps available to answer questions about our own products, and the current, most recent version of the Apex integration. Right? But, even though discontinuing support for Apex v2 would be the most profitable thing for our company, we've been responsive to our customers' concerns and continue to support Apex v2, even though we're in the middle of shipping Aurora, the single largest upgrade in this industry's history. If that's not an example of us doing what's right, I'm not sure what is.

This is the last explanation I'm going to post on this subject.

Scott Kinnaird
CEO
a la mode

 

[Tom Grazioli]

In keeping with the original topic of this thread....

With the help of Tim McDade (thanks Tim) and batch file memories from long ago we got the backups to happen. A call was made to me from Alamode support that corroborated the contrived plan. I’m still at a loss as to why the instructions are not evidently displayed.

Just for the curious, here ya go:

1) On the server you will need to stop the SQL database service that Alamode uses for WinTotal. From a command prompt, it’s “net stop mssql$alamode /y”. If you don’t stop the service you’ll get an error during the backup about files being in use elsewhere.

2) Backup the files on your server that are data for Aurora. A necessary folder that is not evident is:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL$ALAMODE

Remember all the other files too. If you’re like most folks, you upgraded from previous versions. That means there’s a “Win2000” folder on the server that doesn’t belong to Microsoft.

3) You have to restart the database on the server. I leave it down for about 30 minutes. It shouldn’t matter as long as it’s back up before the appraisers begin working. To restart from a command line use “net start mssql$alamode /y”.

Slip those processes into a batch file and use the Scheduled Tasks feature to make them run when you want, like every night. Do you remember DOS? Get cute and you can log the start and stop time of the process in a little text file. See below:

date /t >today.txt
time /t >now.txt
copy begin.txt+today.txt + now.txt timestrt.txt
xcopy "m:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL$ALAMODE\*.*" "d:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL$ALAMODE" /s /c /h /r /y
xcopy "z:\general data\*.*" "d:\general data" /s /c /h /r /y
xcopy "z:\win2000\*.*" "d:\win2000" /s /c /h /r /y
date /t >today.txt
time /t >now.txt
copy end.txt+today.txt + now.txt timeend.txt
copy timestrt.txt+timeend.txt bkuplog.txt

Begin.txt and end.txt just have some words that say stuff like “The backup started at…” A shortcut to bkuplog.txt on the main screen will nudge you to look at it.

To round out the conversation:

The server has a pair of SATA2 drives (quite fast in May of 2006) set up so they mirror each other. The RAID controller that handles that is part of the Intel motherboard in the server. A staged failure proved it to work as advertised. The subsequent rebuild was done on the fly. BTW, mirroring has come into play three times for me.

We use hard drives in removable carriages to backup, one for each day of the week. A tape drive that is big and fast enough to get everything overnight costs quite a bit. And the tapes are more expensive than a hard drive. Without getting real technical, we’re not using USB. We’re plugged directly into the “hard drive channel” of a workstation. The workstation has a 1000 Mbps connection to the server. We move about 45 Gb in 90 minutes.

One last thought. If you haven't tested your backup system, how do you know it works?

Enjoy,

Tom Grazioli
Associated Computer Services
tom@associatedcomputer.cc

 

[Michael Chu]

Proof is in the pudding

............A staged failure proved it to work as advertised.

Wow! Thanks for posting the detailed backup process.
I just knew there was more to it than the Athena version.
You're da man.

 

[Judy Whitehead (Florida)]

By the way, Michael, as I posted on the other thread.......Tim McDade is my computer tech.....how about a little kudos to me? Just tooting my own horn....when I saw how many problems everyone was stressing over, I was pretty sure he could help....he sure has destressed me many times. I do appraising and he does computers.

 

[Michael Chu]

Kudos

Judy W.
I was still green with envy and could not post about your setup. :new_color_:
You have the best arrangement where each does what s/he does best.
I hope to be able to afford a similar arrangement in the near future.

PS your offer for contacting the PC guru was very generous.

 

[Judy Whitehead (Florida)]

Thanks, Michael - I can't afford NOT to have him. He is exceptionally knowledgeable, pleasant, and is pretty reasonable. I recommend him often and use him often. Just think about your income and then factor in the hours you may have spent learning computereeze. Anyway, I think it is worth every nickel - for the stress level alone.

 

[Tom Grazioli]

I was doing research for a client that backs up an enormous amount of data each evening and found some info that might be useful. It led me to adjust the method of backup that I posted earlier in this topic. For the interested:

I found several references to a problem with XCOPY and really large files. It seems that under the right circumstances the computer can “freak” and unexpectedly restart itself. This was happening to us, although the problem ultimately was something else. My routine would abort and the backup would not complete. Reading some tech forums led me to check out ROBOCOPY. Short for Robust File Copy, this utility is supplied by Microsoft with Resource Kits for several recent operating systems. The one for Windows Server 2003 will work and can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en

Note that you will have to install the resource kit to get to the utility. The kit did not disturb any of the four Windows XP computers I used.

ROBOCOPY runs from a command line that requires parameters. The documentation provided has a fairly good explanation of what you need to know. I created a batch file called “bkupchgd.cmd”. The “.cmd” is preferred to “.bat” for computers running Windows NT, 2000, XP, … Use notepad to write it and then rename the file when you’re done. My file looks like:

robocopy z: e: /COPYALL /s /e /xo /R:3 /W:30 /LOG:bkuplog.txt /np

z: .....................where the source files are
e: .....................where they will be copied to
/COPYALL ...........copy all files (think *.* with more)
/s ......................include all subdirectories
/e ......................if a subdir is empty, copy it anyway
/xo ....................copy files that are new or have changed
/r:3 ...................on a failure, retry 3 times
/w:30 ................on a failure, wait 30 seconds before retrying
/log:bkuplog.txt ...create a log file called “bkuplog.txt”
/np ....................in the log file, supress the % of completion

The backup log is very complete, including statistics for the job. Our log turns out to be 15 Mb. I allow that in case there’s a failed copy. I can search bkuplog.txt for “error “ and find out which file didn’t copy, and why. I use /xo to copy new or changed files. Our first backup ran for 2.5 hours. The second took 8 minutes to complete.

There are many more parameters that can be used. Read robocopy.doc to see if there’s something that works for you.

Enjoy,

Tom Grazioli
Associated Computer Services
tom@associatedcomputer.cc