The Importance of Backups

SCENARIO: A camping resort has been operating for over seven (7) years, servicing several repeat guests and regularly receiving new ones to the resort. During an afternoon of horrible weather the power is abruptly interrupted, creating a power surge that crashes their computer's hard drive. Luckily they have copies of the software programs, which are easily reloaded onto a newly installed hard drive. Now the time comes to restore the backup…(WHAT BACKUP?!?!)...the only backup available is from several months ago!! Now the resort operator must reconstruct all the reservations (months or quite possibly even years worth of information) that are missing from the backup.

An unfortunate situation but many computer owners and users do not perform computer backups on a regular basis. This causes great frustration if a computer should crash and the 'reservation' program and associated reservations data needs to be reloaded.

Ideally, if regular backups were performed, a resort operator would not have to recreate any reservations. How many reservations you feel comfortable recreating from credit card receipts, registration forms, emails etc. is a good indication of how often you would like to backup. If you feel comfortable recreating all of your past bookings, do not do a backup. Realistically, no resort operator would ever want to have to recreate hundreds or even thousands of bookings in the event of a system failure; they would like to continue where they left off, hence the importance of regular backups.

The RVTripsetter Reservation System has options for Auto Backups with time intervals of one to six hours. Additionally, the program will prompt you for a backup each time you close the grid.

Saving your data could save your business!!