Recommendations for Regular Data Housekeeping

The data in your Shire system is a valuable asset.

• It represents a large investment of your time building the data up.
• It contains information that is necessary to run your department (and in many cases your business) successfully.
• In many cases would be impossible to replace if it were lost or damaged.

Strange though this may seem, computers have been known to malfunction. Although much of the time these 'crashes' are a temporary irritation that cause no serious damage, some can be more serious. A few simple precautions will protect your data.

Back up your data

A proper backup procedure will safeguard your data even against disasters such as total computer failure.

• Take regular backups of your data.
• Test your procedures with a 'dummy run' restore, to verify that all the correct files are being backed up and that you can successfully recreate your system from a backup.
• Take an additional backup (even if it is simple copy of your files to another directory) before you carry out large-scale changes to your data or update to a new version.

Re-index/Repair your databases

Your Shire system has built-in routines that check the internal integrity of your databases and clear out the accumulated 'dead wood' of old, deleted records. For the DBF files, this is carried out by re-indexing; for the MDB file, the equivalent process is to repair and compact.

• Re-index/repair your databases at regular intervals.
• Always re-index/repair if your PC crashes while you are modifying data, or if the system starts to behave erratically.
• Always re-index if ever you need to restore files from a backup.
• Remember that all other users must log out of the system before this process.