Making Backups; Why Make Backups; Making Backups A Scheduled Event; How To Make A Backup Of Your Handnet Information - Schlage PIB300 User Manual

Other Ongoing Activities

Making Backups

Why Make
Backups
Making Backups
a Scheduled
Event
How to Make
a Backup of
Your HandNet
Information
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Occasionally computer hard drives fail, losing the information on them.
Occasionally computer files get damaged, making the information in them
unusable. And occasionally computer users make mistakes and delete
information they should not. A backup is an extra copy of the information on
your computer, so that if the information gets damaged or lost, you have another
copy to protect you.
The information in HandNet—information about readers, access profiles,
and users—represents many hours of work. The record of activity (including
archived historical activity) is often an important security record. So you should
protect your many hours of work by periodically making a backup copy of this
information.
In practice, many computer users understand that backups are important, but
they still go months or even years without actually making one. Then, when a
problem occurs, the backup they have is so old that it does not save them all
that much work. The way to avoid this is to make backing up your information
a scheduled part of your routine. How often you need to make them depends
on how many changes to the information you make. If you are continually
adding and removing users, a weekly backup might be appropriate. If you make
fewer changes and losing a month's changes would not be that hard to redo,
a monthly backup might be enough. Regardless, decide how often to make a
backup, and then put it on your calendar; do it every Friday morning, or every
month before you print your activity reports. If you do not schedule backups,
they probably will not happen. And if you do not make them, sooner or later
most computer users regret it.
You should periodically be making backups of all the information on your
computer. How to best do that is beyond the scope of these instructions. Here,
we will just tell you how to make a backup of your HandNet information.
1. Use Windows Explorer to go to the folder HandNet is in (if you installed
HandNet in the standard location, it is in C:\Program Files\Schlage
Biometrics, Inc\HandNet for Windows).
2. Make a copy of all of the Microsoft Access Database files (*.MDB) and all
of the HandNet Activity Archive files (*.HNA) in this directory. You can copy
these files to a floppy disk or to a network drive. If the files are large, WinZip
is a helpful and inexpensive utility that lets you both compress a number of
files into a single archive and spread the archive over a number of disks if
needed (to get WinZip, go to www.winzip.com. For help making an archive
span several floppy disks, look up "spanning" in the index of WinZip's help).
The best protection is to store the backup disks in a different place than the
computer. That way, if the computer is damaged by fire or water, or if the
computer equipment is stolen, there is no chance of the backup disks being
damaged or taken.
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