DHES

Recently I have received a couple of emails from users who have had serious hiccups on their computer's hard drives. Needless to say one, or more, or all of their POS program / data files were moved to that big hard drive in the sky. In other words their files were gone or corrupted and they were totally screwed.

While downloading the latest version of the POS program will solve their software woes their data is gone forever.

Listen folks, it is not <u>if</u> your hard drive will die or otherwise make your life miserable, it is <u>when.</u> Do I feel responsible for their files going bye-bye forever? Well, nope. I did not build their computer or write their operating system (DOS / Windows.) POS hands off the data to the operating system and then it is up to the operating system to actually file the data to the hard drive without having electronic hallucinations and sending the data to digital oblivion instead. All application software works this way.

So what should you do? Well, backing up your files on a regular schedule would be a really clever idea. Unfortunatly the program files or the data files for POS are too large to fit on a floppy disk. They will fit on a CD if you have a CD-RW drive or if you have a USB port you can use one of the new "Thumb" sized RAM drives. While either of these options will cost a few bucks if you do not already have one, it will probably be cheaper than the therapy you will need after losing all your files to a hard drive crash.

Remember this is not the current game settings for Doom that you are going to be missing, this is your money and your business.

You also could put the data files into a zip file

Well you can try. However the maximum size of the sales record file is 20 megabytes and the customer info file can grow without limit. Even if you zip the files you may not get them under 1.44 megs. Of course you can spread the file across several floppies but most people do not know how to do that and anyway it is a real pain in the neck compared to just doing a bulk copy to a device that can hold the files in their original form.

The price of thumb drives are definatly coming down, just go to wal-mart and pick up a 128Mb or so ($38-40) and make a new folder for each register, then copy away. I bought one when the 128 was about $50-60 but i think its the best thing to happen to a computer EVER. Because with thumb drives, it is IF.

Dylan Robinson
--Site currently down--

Why not just RAR the files? With RAR compression, you can pack alot more into a smaller file.

I believe it compresses better than ZIP

Dale Harris wrote: Remember this is not the current game settings for Doom that you are going to be missing, this is your money and your business.

I'll be damned if I lose either the current doom settings or my POS system, (doom is one of my guilty pleasures when there are no customers), so Definitely back up your system, it's common sense.

cmputerman2000 Not lgd in wrote:Why not just RAR the files? With RAR compression, you can pack alot more into a smaller file.

I believe it compresses better than ZIP

It can be. Volumes, spanning, and more. WINRAR does not only do RAR files but it can handle ZIP files like WINZIP.
Get it here! http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar351.exe
THIS LINK IS TO A 991 KB English WinRAR FILE

Right now Walmart has a 256 meg usb flash drive for under $25. If you do not have a usb port you can purchase a usb card for your computer for about $20, now you are set. I have 2 usb drives for backup just in case one should fail. It takes a total of 2 mins. to back up the entire program on both, pretty cheap insurance. I have a DVD-RW and a CD-RW but these little usb drives are just the best. Now they are making usb drives that are able to be partitioned, encrypted, password protected, now that is so cool.

okie

Yes i just have a little memorex 256 MB "thumb" drive that everynight i plug in and get the most recent changes on there so if something happens i've got it there and ebay is a super good place to buy those they can cost as little as 10.00 but i dont buy mine there i buy them at OfficeMax

I see this quite often these days when fixing customers tills.

One of my largest customers is using tills dating from 1997-2000 which run 24/7, these machines typically still have 1.2Gb hard disks that are worn out making the till extremely slow and not surprisingly are freezing (causing them to loose data) as they are life expired.
IDE hard disks are not particularly reliable as far as data storage is concerned, SCSI is a prefered choice. Most stores only use the local till hard drive for temporary storage with the data being sent to a server for backup.

There are several options though for backup as Dale suggests, but I have another suggestion:

Another quick and easy method of backup is to use two hard disks in your tills and backup the DH-POS folder onto the other hard drive every night.

For those of you that are computer enthusiasts then you could always consider a basic RAID 0 setup where you have two identical drives mirroring each other constantly.

USB, CD-RW etc etc is only good if your till is a decent spec and is running a later operating system. If your PC is running 2000/XP then a memory key is indeed perfect.

Alan