Testing Your Backups for Integrity

Just having backups is a very good start.

We also recommend doing tests on any important data according to a schedule. For example, with your accounting data, printing a balance sheet or income statement monthly and then testing the receivables balance is a generally accepted accounting principle. What you are doing is really testing the data integrity.

Theatre Manager has some built in safeguards. We recommend:

1. Scheduling the backup process one or more times daily.
2. Looking at the backup sizes daily to see that they are generally similar or growing in size as you use the system. TM will alert you if a backup is missed or is smaller in size than the previous one, indicating a possible problem - but do not rely on this as your only visual test of backups running properly.
3. Using
   • AMS Offsite Backup storage to automate sending data securely offsite -or-
   • making copies on removable media and on thumb drives and taking some offsite manually
4. Restoring your backup database periodically to ensure that it can be restored.