We installed Microvellum on C: drive of the PC, we used all default settings during the install. This means that the data are saved in C:\Program Files\Microvellum.

Dear all, my question is that how do I backup Microvellum? or what should I backup before disaster happens?

This is a basic and critical issue, but I have not found the answer on the forums, and it seems that nobody has ever raised this question on the forums.

Any thoughts and ideas are greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance,

Jack 

There answer to your question is preference related.....

I use an external harddrive that mirrors My critical folders. Since all of your folders are in the default location, the only folder you need to back up is the Microvellum folder in your program files.  You could also back up all the .dll files located in your windows system32 folder that have the prefix "MV" or "CR" (crystal reports). But these are files that you could get back by reinstalling updates. 

The advantage of using an external harddrive using a software to mirror your folders such as "sea gate free agent" is that you can continue to work without having to remember to back up, and when you need to take your files to another location to work on, all you need to do is unplug your drive. These harddrives are under $150 and in my opinion "Seagate"makes the best retail drive.

Jack,

We work off of a central storage server in our office. This has it's advantages and it's disadvantages. The disadvantage is that when the server is off-line no one can work. The advantage is that we have a tape-back up on the storage server that is set to back up every night at 1 am.
Of course someone has to change the tapes out daily (it takes me about 10 minutes tops, using visionapp remote desktop to access the storage server)... however, in the unlikely event of a crash even of the server you only lose that days work (done since the automatic backup the night before). So yes you lose about a days worth of work, from your office, but in the long run that is little compared to the entire office.
We used to use an external hard-drive, and the speed with which access and back-ups occured caused the president of the company to go with the storage server. Also if you have an automated back-up to the external if you somehow contract a virus the external hard-drive is not smart enough to prevent the virus from infecting it (I found this out in college when my hard drive and external were both corrupted by a virus). However, an independant storage server is capable and often has a seperate virus prevention system on it.
That is something to think about, if you have a constant internet connection an independant storage server may be the way to go.
Of course the price difference is rather dramatic, you can pick up a good external hard drive for about $200 when an entry level Dell storage server will cost you about $1200. So that is something to think about, is the potential protection offered by the independant server worth $1000 dollars to you or do you have the extra $1000 to invest?

Hope this helps a little

Thanks a lot Dan for the backup ideas!!

Do I have to backup everything in "C:\Program Files\Microvellum" ?  Can I backup the user data only? If so, what should I backup?

I guess I do not have to backup system files which can be recovered by software reinstall.

Thanks and have a good day

jack

Hi Brown, thanks a lot for the info.

We have a Windows server as well, we backup the server daily. To my understanding, you put Microvellum on the server, is that right?

If so, how did you do this?

thanks and have a good day

jack 

jack,

okay we do have microvellum running off our windows server. Here is how I did it when setting it up (I've become kind of the IT guy around here). I took all the information that the program looks for, and I identified it off the options screen and folder pathing. Made copies of these folders onto our storage server in a couple locations, just to be safe, then pathed the folders to the individual computers that are using mv. You still have to have the program installed on the individual computers, but having all the information on the server allows more than one person to access it at the same time. Of course if you have multiple people working on the same job it doesn't work, not really sure why exactly, but whoever gets the job opened first gets to work on it.
If you can't get this to work I will be on to check again in a couple hours, and will do my best to explain it better.

 Hi Jack,

I see that most are using a server and this is one way to keep all designers using the same standards and to have all your jobs centrally located incase someone is out, etc. I want to mention that there are different kinds of servers and that some don't need this extra step of backing up. Has anyone considered the Raid 1 tyoe server. This server has 2 identical hard drives and the logic to write to both identical information, "mirrored" drives. You think that you are writing to a single drive, but the hardware takes care of the redundancy. In case of a hard drive failure, the server reports the problem, you replace the failed drive with a new drive (best to have one on hand, it has to be the same as the  original) and the server hardware copies the good drives data to the replaced drive and you are back in business without loss of any data. The effective size of the server is the size of one of the hard drives, not both.

There are Raid 5 servers also (bring a lot more money) that allow "Hot Swapping" of the drives. I think that for this type of application they are an overkill. 

I hope this helps by giveg you another possibility to ponder.

Doug 

RAID1 and RAID5 (as well as RAID10, RAID15, etc.) are great ways at having the "live" data ready for failures. RAID stands for "redundant array of inexpensive disks" and is actually not a "backup" method. Backups are ways to store the data and take them offline so they are not "live" and once created are independent of the original "live" data. This is why tapes, CD's, DVD's, external hard drives, etc. are used for offline "backups". Depending on the funds, the computer hardware, network layout, what you consider "important data", etc. all changes the way you would backup Microvellum or actually anything. IMHO, the best choice is a mixture of these technologies that will not break the companies budget.

RAID1 by itself is not enough to make me feel comfortable about the data. For that matter, neither is RAID5. I would want a RAID level of some sort (mirror or striping with parity or both) PLUS a tape backup and/or multiple DVD backups, and/or an external USB hard drive, and (if budget allows) offsite data storage.

Ultimately, I would want to have as many redundant options as possible in case the data really does need to be restored because when restoring data it is usually found out then that the backups didn't quite work right (or so-and-so left the DVD/tape/hard drive in their car and it got too hot/spilled coke on it/...).

Which brings me to another point... the only *real* way to test a backup is to restore it in its entirity. For many companies this is hard to do because it either requires planned downtime to "break" the server and restore the data, OR another server that is used only when data needs to be restored. Both of these options are usually too expensive and/or time consuming (money as well) for small business to handle.

Backing up and restoring (especially restoring) is a headache. Hard drive images/snapshots are another option and are helpful but take a lot of space usually. Software like Acronis True Image will do things like this (so will the UNIX command "dd" piped into gzip).

Good luck 

I agree with Richard, backups are indeed a headache. However, in comparison to the headache of all the lost information they are rather insignificant.
Here's how we do backup. Off of our independant server we have a tape drive. This tape drive gets switched every morning, and stored off-site.
The reason we have a back-up that goes off site is because of the same way that we are interacting, the internet. We have anti-virus software in place, however a back-up is the best way to insure that were you to get a virus you could do a system restore (which gets rid of virus' in most cases) and then just load your backup tape in and wait a couple days. We have about 110 gb of information on our server, and a restoration of about 160 mb took about 45 minutes off of our tape drive, so you could imagine how long 110 gigs would take.
I hope that all of our input has helped you out and not confused you more.

acorn:

Do I have to backup everything in "C:\Program Files\Microvellum" ?  Can I backup the user data only? If so, what should I backup?

Everything in C:\Progam Files\Microvellum might be overkill. On my machine here that's 1.21 GB of space

I run a daily backup of C:\Program Files\Microvellum\Frameless Library 2006 v66 Imperial, which is 683 MB currently, or about half the size.

The latter folder contains: Drawing Templates, Jobs, Library, Library Designer, Microvellum Data, Room Components, Subassemblies, Subassemblies Designer, Template, Toolfiles, and UserFiles.

I'd say you want all of these for whichever library you're using.

Basically I didn't think it necessary to backup the program files (and older v6 library) since they can be reinstalled with the install CD and/or downloaded updates.

There are a lot of good ideas in this thread.  I for one do multiple things for backing up information.  With hard drives so cheap and automation of the whole back up process so easy with good software I don't think you can have enough.  Although I will be the first to admit that I might overdo it.  But here goes.

1.  Our server is a Raid 10, 4 hard drives paired together in a mirrored and striped configuration.  All of our data is stored there from proposals to MV data.

2.  Our server is automaticaly backed up to one of two external hard drive every night at midnight and swapped out every day.  One goes home with me every night, no good in having the information backed up if it is all in the same place.

3.  Our laptops, no towers here, are all set up to sync folders with the server and set up so that those folders are available offline.  So even if we do work on projects at home you have all of the data you need, this limits the need to set up a VPN connection to the server, which sloooooooooows down working in MV to a snails pace because of all of the file writing back and forth that goes on.  In the morning all the information is updated to the server when we log into the local network. This also provides another backup of critical files in a worst case scenario.

4.  We back up each laptop to external hard drives on a weekly basis.

 Yes, I know it is redundant but I have not lost a file in several years.  This all came about after taking the "oh this will never happen to me attitude"  well it did and I paid dearly with the data I lost.  Now I am a little more aware of it.

Good luck in whatever you decide to do.