I've been a lazy blogger the past month or so. Seems like my writers blo
ck coincided with our move to our new blogging location on RoseBizInc.com so hopefully this entry will get me back in the spirit. If I fail miserably to excite, inspire, inform or educate anyone who reads these blogs please don't tell me so. I'd rather live in a spirit of happy ignorance than to really hear your true opinion.Had an interesting happening a few weeks ago. Had a client that has project accounting, purchasing etc. We were seeing some rather interesting results in the POP module so we ran check links on the purchasing transaction table. No problem. We then ran it on the purchasing historical transaction table and let it run during the night. Looked at it in the morning and noticed a check links report that had 4500 pages of removed historical transactions. Yikes. If you don't know GP:
1. Why are you reading this blog
2. That is not a good thing
3. Check links is sometimes refered to as "Break Links". It's a tool used to verify data in the tables and will either say it's all good, add back in info that's missing, or remove data not needed.
So no sweat, lets restore to last nights backup. System guys says, cool, I'll let you know when it's restored. Now in this situation what would be the worst possible thing that you could hear when you pick up a call from the systems guy. In my case it was "uh, we got a problem." Turns out they have been doing backups to the same tape drive for the last month. Each night it wrote over the previous nights backup. And when they went to restore the backup some how they managed to delete their one and only backup for the last month and a half. Turns out the guy responsible for backups was in Costa Rica on vacation for another week so.... It's funny now that I look back on it.
There's more to the story but I'll leave this post with a moral:
When in doubt (or even if you are not), BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP your Dynamics GP system. Here is an older post I did about backing up GP in case you want to make sure you are backing up all aspects of your GP system.
posted by Doug Pitcher @ Tuesday, June 09, 2009
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Doug
This sounds so familiar.
In my pre-GP days, I developed and sold a system that ran a real estate conveyancing office.
We had a user call regarding an error that the system was missing a database (dBase) file.
So I went out there to restore from a back... we had recommended lunch time and end of day backups onto separate floppy disks for each day.
I found out, that when the error had occurred, the user had shutdown and backed up.
He had not been doing the lunch time backups and had been using the same disks for every end of day backup.
So, he had backed up the damaged system over the top of his ONLY good backup. Hence losing any chance of recovery.
I was able to recreate the file with all the required records..... just that there was no actual data in the records. He had to re-enter the data from the paper files.
Moral: Backup lots and rotate the backup media AND store a set of backup media offsite.
David
http://blogs.msdn.com/DevelopingForDynamicsGP/
Doug,
I guess we all have ran into these stressful circumstances at some point in time.
A few years aback, I was resting in the peace of my home on a Saturday, getting ready to take the kids to see a movie. After all, I had worked some 65 hours that week and had bearly seen them.
Little before I finished getting the kids ready to leave, I received a frantic call from my boss... this could not be any good. Turns out, one of our largest clients had just had a bunch of hard disks on their GP server blown out and needed assistance with recovering their data. Despite the huge dissapointment to the kids, I drove for a full hour and a half to the client site. When I got there, I went straight to the tape backup cabinet and retrieve the 6:00 AM Saturday backup. After all, it was Saturday and only a few transactions had been entered.
After the IT people replaced the damaged hard disks for a fresh pair, I began the recovery process. I placed the tape in the tape backup unit and began the restore process... I guess, we all hate when the tape backup unit light starts to blink in middle of a restore. This was not good news. After a good pulls and shoves, we desisted from the 6:00 AM tape and moved on to Friday's 10:00 PM tape... lights blinking again.
After a while, it was clear the tape backup unit was damaged. The unit never reported any errors during a backup process -- and IT never tested the backups either, this is, they never attempted to restore a tape... ever! After the backup unit was replaced (after all they had spares for everything they purchased), we realized that the only known good backup dated back more than a month! By then, it was 9:00 PM and Sunday seemed like another day of work.
Communicating this news to the CFO and Controller of the company was not pleasant. I spent the entire Sunday restoring and printing reports for the accounting team to have available first thing on Monday. Fortunately, the accounting team was pretty organized and had all vendor invoices, customer invoices and payments, bank statements, etc., filed away with the corresponding GP journals. They hired a team of temps from some bodyshop company and began entering all the missing data going back a month.
At the end, they were only off by a couple dollars here and there, but decided to live with it.
Not only are backups important, but also testing these backups periodically to ensure you can always recover if needed goes a long way. Backup hardware needs to be check periodically and quite important is to have spear units hanging around in case of an emergency.
PS. The client is in the entertainment industry and repaid the weekend effort with free movie passes for the entire month!
MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com
Doug
Back in the day when I worked in accounting management, I started work for a large not for profit with a dedicated IT department. One of the first things I asked about was the status of database backups. The IT assured me that they ran every night at mid night and everything was fine. I asked them to restore the backup to a TEST database. They were insulted, but I insisted. To make a long story short, two weeks and several thousand dollars later (for disk backup equipment), they had still been unable to restore a tape backup. Moral of the story, don't believe it unless they prove it.
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