For most photographers, there are digital image files that you want to safeguard against loss and, in fact, are the cornerstone of your business.  If you lose your digital images, you can’t get them back; you can only do them over.  That may not go over very well with your customers. While image files are not stored in the StudioPlus Spectra database, Spectra can help you manage your images against loss.  We will soon have a service available to you help better protect your image files.

The other type of digital information you want to safeguard is the data you enter into StudioPlus Spectra.  Most likely, you are entering information into StudioPlus Spectra almost every day.  Some of it is more critical like payment information and orders.  Other times, it may just be the addition of some small tidbit like a nickname.

So, what would happen if your computer crashed, was stolen, or is destroyed in something like a fire?  The computer hardware itself, while not necessarily cheap, is easily replaced.  Software is often easily re-installed from readily available sources on the Internet.  However, the information you collected with help of the software is usually kept locally on your system and needs to be protected from loss separately.

The good news for Spectra users is there are a number of different ways within the software to backup that critical business data.  I have been frequently asked how often you should backup the Spectra data. My answer is; how much do you want to lose?
Putting aside unlikely major disasters like a fire or tornado, the computer equipment itself should be more of a concern.  Through my years of support, I have come to the philosophy that it is not IF your computer is going to fail, it’s WHEN.  Hard drives seem to be more like light bulbs; they aren’t designed to last forever.

Spectra, by default, creates a subfolder of where your data resides to store your backup. That’s because it is a path it knows exists and the program has access to.  I often have customers perform a quick backup in preparation for an update or upgrade or when you are going to do some major work on the data like a client import.  So, if something goes wrong, you can always just restore that.  However, that is on the same hard drive as your data.  If that drive fails, you lose your data and your backups.  That is why the backup process itself advises you make a copy and store it somewhere separate from the computer.  Network users can simply specify another mapped drive location that goes to another computer’s hard drive.  The likelihood of both computers completely failing is much smaller.

But what about the big disaster like a virus that infects all of your computers or that fire?  It is best to also periodically make a copy of a backup to a removable media like a CD, DVD, or jump drive.  You can then take this media with you and store it somewhere offsite.

If you are only using Spectra to enter sessions or just clients (but why would you – Spectra has so much more to offer!), you may not worry about losing a week’s worth of data.  But if you put in dozens of invoices and payments each day, you would not want to lose more than a day’s worth.  For network users, I like to recommend daily backups.

So, how can StudioPlus help you preserve your data?  This is what I would recommend:

• First, use the Database Utility to perform a quick backup in preparation for some big change like an import, update or upgrade.
• Second, sign up for the StudioPlus DataSafe service and use the  Control Center to send your backups offsite to our secure server.  It’s automatic, and it gets the backup to a safe and secure location that is not a part of your local environment.
  Learn more about DataSafe here.
• If you don’t want to sign up for DataSafe, then use the Control Center to automatically perform a daily backup.  Direct the backup to another hard drive, preferably even on another computer. The Control Center job can be re-directed to a different location than the Database Utility is using.  You can also use the Database Utility to make a backup to a removable media once a week and take it home with you.