Hi Andrew,

The only other process I can think of is 3X Back Up that our IT people are testing on our system. It looks like it's scheduled to start running at 8:00 pm. Maybe this is the culprit? I'll try scheduling DataCare Backup to run at 7:00 pm for now so it will finish before 3X Back Up is scheduled to start. If it works I'll rearrange the schedule to avoid having them run together.

As a test just now, I tried DataCare Backup while 3X was running and it resulted in a corrupt backup. Then I paused 3X and ran DataCare Backup again and it resulted in a good backup.

Do you know how long it is taking DataCare to backup your data? You should try and give a 50% margin for error when scheduling these two tasks.

The Backup portion of DataCare takes about 7-10 minutes. The integrity check that follows takes another 7-10 minutes. The total job approx 20 minutes.

You're good to go then.

Andrew:

We have been very careful to make sure that our clients are not running anything else concurrently with DataCare. As DataCare backs up the data first and then does the DIC, is it possible that the zip file is still being built (as winzip creates a temp file first and then writes it to the real zip file) when the DIC starts, resulting in this issue?

Nope.

I will keep an eye on it now that I am aware of the problem. If we get any corrupt backups when there are no other processes running, I will report back. My DataCare was set to only keep 5 back ups so I couldn't look back any further. I've changed it now to keep 25.

Update:

DataCare has been working great now that our other back up job has been scheduled at a different non-conflicting time. Last night someone decided to use Adagio at the time that DataCare was scheduled to run.

The result was this:

DCB1775.ZIP
DCB1775.Z01
DCB1775.Z02
DCB1775.Z03
DCB1775.Z04
DCB1775.Z05
DCB1775.Z06
DCB1775.Z07
DCB1775.Z08
DCB1775.Z09
DCB1775.Z10

This zip file is corrupt and the backup is therefore useless.

The problem is that DataCare reports this as: "Backup completed ... OK and, "Data integrity check was complete with no errors".

Shouldn't DataCare report this as a failure? If someone doesn't check the back up every day, we'll never know whether we have a good back up or not.

Hi Susan:
In Datacare's Company Profile settings there is an option called "Backup error considered a fail". It's located on the "Job defaults" tab. What is your setting?

It's an option because Datacare's foremost job is to check the integrity of the accounting data. The backup process is a secondary function. This option allows the user to flag a backup failure if they wish.

Hi Bruce,

"Backup error considered a fail" is checked. The problem is that DataCare doesn't recognize that there is a back up error.