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Period End Procedures

Your Silver Plus system requires periodic system maintenance to ensure speed, efficiency, and accuracy in your daily operations. The period end procedures preserve your data and establish your company's position and status as of a given fiscal period for financial and management reporting.

These procedures are continually changing as new applications are added to the system and existing applications are enhanced. For this reason, checklists of these procedures are not included in the system documentation. Instead, they are published in KeyOps to ensure you have access to the most accurate, up-to-date information. The most current issue of Keyops is available on our web site. To see the latest period end procedures, click here.

Other procedures that you will perform on a regular basis include:

• Backing Up Files
• Restoring Files

Backing Up Files

You add vital information to your eNsite files every day: new pick tickets, new invoices, purchase orders, and on and on. To protect this information, you need to back up these files every day. Make it a policy to back up:

• As part of your day-end procedures
• Before you make a mass change to one of your databases.

Performing regular backups ensures that you have an accurate and complete audit trail of your business activity. This lets you review or recover information at a later date without having to recreate it manually.

To help you protect your data, we'll cover the following topics here:

• Establishing a backup policy
• Selecting the right tape
• Retiring old tapes
• Storing tapes
• Backing up and verifying

Establishing a Backup Policy

It's ultimately your responsibility to determine how much protection you want to have for your backups. However, Silver Plus recommends the following:

• Have one backup tape for each day of the business week. Rotate these every week: every Monday you back up on the Monday tape, for example.
• Once a week, make a backup that you will keep for the entire month.
• Once a month, make a backup that you will keep.
  Make a tape when you do your year-end procedures that you will keep.
• Keep a few spare tapes at all times. Tapes can break or develop bad spots at inconvenient times.
• Make a policy for retiring old tapes. (Tapes have a definite shelf life.)
• Make a policy for verifying tapes — verify once a week, for example. (We explain how to verify in the instructions for backing up and verifying.)

You should also consider off-site storage for your weekly or monthly tapes. You do not want to lose all of your backups if your building burns or floods.

Selecting the Right Tape

You must use the correct tape for your drive, or no backup will do you any good. When you get a new tape drive with a larger capacity, you must purchase new tapes for that drive.

To select the right tape, you must know which tape drive you have, and then select tapes the manufacturer recommends for that tape drive.

This is ultimately your responsibility, but we can provide you with a few guidelines.

Silver Plus tape drives are DAT tapes. They're small — about the size of a cassette tape. They have a small tape opening with the name Seagate on them. Use tapes with a DDS 3 format, and a length of DDS-125.

Retiring Old Tapes

To make sure that your backups will work if you need them, you must consider tape life. Every time you use a tape, you wear away some of the magnetic media that holds your data. Opinions vary on how many backups you can reliably make on a tape, but the documented life for DAT tapes is about 5000 backups.

Tapes also degrade with time, whether you use them or not. Their shelf life varies widely, depending on care, temperature, humidity and many other factors. Published opinions on shelf life range from one to 30 years.

You should check with the manufacturer of the tapes you use, and follow their recommendations regarding the number of backups and shelf life. Create a company policy for retiring tapes at appropriate intervals.

Some dealers retire their daily tapes, which see the most use, by periodically turning them into monthly tapes. After a few months of use, for example, you might use the old Monday tape as your month-end tape for January, the Tuesday tape for February, and so forth.

Storing Tapes

Even if you retire your tapes regularly, they can be unreliable if you mistreat them. To care for your tapes, follow these rules:

• Keep tapes in an environment that’s reasonably free from dirt, dust, fingerprints, food, cigarette smoke and ash, and airborne pollutants.
• Do not drop tapes.
• Keep tapes out of strong sunlight, and avoid contact with liquids or extreme heat.
• Do not store tapes on radiators, window sills, televisions, electronic equipment, or machinery.
• Put tapes back on their storage shelf when they’re not in use. Do not store them flat, like plates; place them on edge, like books.

Backing Up and Verifying

To back up files on your eNsite server:

1. Insert a backup tape into your drive.

2. Quit all programs that are currently running, including the TBL Server. Open files cannot be backed up.

   To close the TBL Server:

• Click the TBL Server icon in the lower taskbar.
• When the TBL Server window appears, choose File and select Exit.

• At the Warning message, click OK.

3. Click Start, point to Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools, and select Backup.

4. The first time you back up, the Import Media Present dialog box appears. Check Allocate all compatible import media to Backup.

5. Click the Backup tab.

6. Click the C: and D: boxes to back up both drives, as shown here.

If you want to back up specific files, instead of selecting the C: and D: drives, navigate to the folder that contains these files. Then select all three files that begin with the same name. These three files have different extensions: .cdx, .dbf, and .key. You must include all three to obtain the complete file. To back up the !DES file, for example, select the !DES.CDX, !DES.DBF, and !DES.KEY files, as shown here:

7. In the Backup Destination box, select DAT.

8. Click the Start Backup button.

9. If this is your first backup:
   • When the Backup Job Information dialog box appears, click the Advanced button.
   • In the Advanced Backup Options dialog box, select If possible, compress the backup data to save space.

   • Click OK.

10. If you want to verify this backup:
    • When the Backup Job Information dialog box appears, click the Advanced button.

    • In the Advanced Backup Options dialog box, select Verify data after backup, as shown here:

    

    • Click OK.

11. In the Backup Dialog Information dialog box, click Start Backup. The backup begins.

12. If you're verifying this backup, Windows creates a log file that describes the backup.
    • To view the log, return to the Backup program, click the Tools menu, and select Reports.
    • Select the backup date, click View or Print, and review the log to make sure the backup was successful.

Restoring Files

Occasionally, you may need to restore volumes or files from a backup tape to your system’s hard drive. When you restore files, remember that each eNsite file consists of three separate files: a .dbf, .cdx, and .key. To restore a specific file, you must restore all three files to your hard drive, or you will only have partial data.

To restore system volumes or individual files, follow these steps:

1. Insert the tape into your drive.
   
   
2. Quit all programs currently running, including the TBL Server. Open files cannot be restored. To close the TBL Server:
   
   
   • Click the TBL Server icon in the lower task bar.
   • When the TBL Server window appears, choose File and select Exit.
   • At the Warning message, click OK.
     
     
3. Click Start, point to Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools, and select Backup.
   
   
4. When the Backup dialog box appears, click the Restore tab.
   
   
5. Windows 2000 keeps a catalog of backups. The information you want to restore must have a catalog entry before you can restore it.
   

   If the information on your tape has been cataloged, you see two icons in the left pane: a File and a DAT icon. If you see only the File and DAT icons, go to Step 8.

If the information on your tape has not been cataloged, you either see the New Import Media dialog box, or an Import icon in the left pane.

If you see the New Import Media dialog box, go to Step 6.

If you see the Import icon, go to Step 7.

6. If you see the New Import Media dialog box, catalog the information on your tape by selecting Allocate this media to Backup now. This option is circled in the figure below:

   

   Click OK, and go to Step 8.

7. If you see the Import icon, click the plus sign (+) next to it to display the entries.
   
   Right-click the entry you want to restore from, and catalog it by selecting the Add to Backup Media option.
   
   
8. Click the plus sign (+) by the DAT icon to open it.
   
   
9. The cataloged entries on your tape appear in the right pane. Double-click the appropriate entry. As the tape is read, the drives you backed up are displayed
   
   
10. You can restore an entire volume by selecting the corresponding folder. You can also choose to restore individual files within a folder.
    
    Double-click the drive that contains the folders or files you want to restore.
    
    If there is more than one entry for the correct drive, you need to check each of them for the folder or files you want to restore.
    
    
11. Once you find the correct drive, open the DDMS folder by clicking it. A folder for each volume serial included on this backup appears in the left pane, as show below.
    
    
    
    
12. To restore an entire volume, click the corresponding folder. A blue check mark indicates that you selected an entire folder.
    
    To restore individual files, double-click the appropriate folder, and then select the files. If you specify specific files, be sure to select all three files: a .dbf, .cdx, and .key. If you do not select all three, you will not restore all the data.
    
    In the figure below, all three of the circled files must be restored if you want to restore the C-MASTER file. Note that the files you select have blue check marks, and the folder containing these files has a grey check mark. The grey check mark indicates that some of the files it contains have been selected, but not all.
    
    
    
    
13. After selecting all the files or volumes you want to restore, select the appropriate option in the Restore Files To box:
    

• Original location: Restores files to the folders they were backed up from, and may overwrite existing files with the same name.



• Alternate location: Lets you specify a different location for your files. This option creates the necessary folders within the folder you specify. If you’re restoring the IN folder, for example, and you select an alternate location of C:, the system creates an IN folder on C:.
  

14. The type of restoration you’re doing is displayed to the right of the Restore Files To box. The option displayed in the figure below always overwrites the existing files with those from your backup tape:
    
    
    
    You have three options to choose from:
    
    
    • Do not replace any existing files
    • Replace files only if the existing file is older
    • Always replace existing files.
      
      

If the displayed option is not what you need, go to the Tools menu, and select Options. Click the Restore tab, select the appropriate option, and click OK.


15. Click the Start Restore button.