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Having a data backup plan is very important in case of hardware failure or data loss due to power outages, file corruption etc. Backups should be done daily. A weekly backup of data should be stored at an off site location, in case of fire etc.. A USB Thumb Drive or USB External Hard Drive or something similar  is recommended for backup and storage.

RTO Pro comes with a backup utility that will backup data only or the entire RTOwin directory. Any backup program can be used to do backups. The utility that comes with RTO Pro is simple to use and is the preferred method.

If you use another program besides the RTO Pro backup utility you should make sure that when you do one days backup it is not overwriting the previous days. You should not overwrite a previous backup until it is at least a week old. The backup program that comes with Zip drives always overwrites previous backups on the disk with the new backup. This is all right if you have a disk for each day. If you do not have a disk for each day you are open you should not use the Zip backup utility or any other backup software that overwrites previous backups.

When overwriting previous backups a problem that could occur is as follows: Monday morning you do a backup. Monday during the day you have some type of data corruption from power outage etc., however you do not notice the problem Monday. Tuesday morning you do a backup and it overwrites the Monday backup. You then find out about the corruption and realize you have overwritten your good data from Monday morning with the corrupted data from Tuesday morning. This is why you should have a good backup plan and make sure not to overwrite backups until they are at least a week old.

Note: If you use the RTO Pro backup program it has restore functions built into it and we can instruct you how to do backups and restores. .If you use other software to do backups we cannot help you performing backups or restores.

Sample backup plan:

If you are open Monday – Saturday. Have 8 backup disk’s. Label Monday through Saturday, the eighth one label Saturday also. Each day at the end of the day do a backup using the days disk. On Saturday after doing the backup take the disk to an outside location, Home Office, home etc. Return the previous Saturday’s disk to the store Monday AM, then repeat the process.

Notice: If you are planning on using a CDR (A CD Writer) for backup purposes we do not provide technical support for backing up to CDR’s or CDRW’s. CDR’s can be used for backups but they have to be formatted and software must be installed that allows you to write directly to the CD. This process is often complicated, different from one computer to another and not always 100% reliable. If you have problems writing to a CDR, you should contact the software company that made your CD writing software.