Currently, when a Payroll Archive is run, a backup of the company is created, then the payroll archive function runs, then another backup of the company is created, and then a backup of the payroll archive company is created. That is three backups for the Payroll Archive function in DAT! While I'm always in favor of automating tasks, having three backups takes a lot of time for us. For example, I just now finished doing a Payroll Archive for this year. It took a total of 2.5 hours. The actual payroll archiving took approximately 35 minutes; the remainder was spent on creating those three backups!!! I would LOVE to have the option in DAT's Payroll Archive screen to choose whether or not I want the backups to be created. I understand the backup before payroll is archived, but I don't understand the backups AFTER payroll is archived. Having this option would save me A LOT of time and prevent excessive downtime for our Sage users.
by: Tim L. | over a year ago | Other
Comments
I completely agree... they should stop forcing the backups on us, simply put up a reminder message box telling us to do an on-demand backup if we haven't already done so. We had an issue with a database update that was generating an error and stopping the process... well this company file takes 30 minutes to backup... so with just 4 errors occurring it took over 2 hours to fix the database problem and suffer through the backups each time... total waste of our time. The fix attempts were quick, but we had to suffer the backups each time... #progammingflaw
The forced backup is so that Sage can restore itself should it hit any road blocks during the the process. Sage has no way of confirming that you made the backup first. And the reason you do is in case you have a power outage or disconnect during the process that Sage could not roll back from.
Now if your backups are taking too long, then you need to be looking at why that is. Need to upgrade your hardware or operating system, increase your RAM? Or are you using attachments and they are stored within your company folder which causes longer backups. If its an attachment issue, then check out Wright Office Solutions Attachment Manager. https://wrightoffice.com/attachments-management/
Their program will relocate the attachments outside the company folders and point all archives of the same company to that new location so that they all share the same set of attachments and are no longer a part of every archive and every backup created. This will save lots of space on your server as well. Then your IT company just backups up the new location as a part of their nightly backup.