how to restore backup

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 7/15/2015 9:52 PM, Gary Holtum wrote:
> Thank you Chris. I was not sure if I would lose data doing it this way. The
> database software I am familiar with, usually has a backup and restore
> function somewhere. I am not used to all the backup and log files that are
> created.
> Gary
Trust me, I once did this sort of thing for my living. If an application 
has only a simple backup-restore then ALL you could do is restore from 
the immediately preceding backup (all earlier ones are lost). So if the 
problem was two or three backups previous and you need to restore from 
immediately before THAT, no hope.

Here you have a time-date stamped series of backups, so if you know WHEN 
the problem occurred, you can recover. Of course you need to figure out 
the right one to restore from (I remember once, where I worked, a wrong 
backup was used, and it was working many days working around the clock 
till we got the corporate database current again). So be careful about that.

What I suggest is every so often you go into the directory and delete 
the really old backups (pairs of files) that you are sure you won't 
need. And of course if you are using a general backup process (for ALL 
of your user data) you can use that instead --- here there would be no 
name change involved.

Michael D Novack