Automate a backup via exporting?

[Phil Freihofner]

HI -

I have a database application used by about 8 people in a Hospital
department, fairly actively. The nature of the situation is such that every
now and then, despite best efforts, we get a corruption crash. Leaving aside
the various things I am doing to prevent crashes, I am wondering about adding
a button to automate the creation of a backup. The Hospital's I.T. department
does a backup every evening, but the folks I am working with get grumpy about
the wait to restore and the loss of a day's work.

If I were there, or we had more savvy users, we could simply copy the
database to another directory every few hours. But I am unclear how to shell
out from Access VBA to do this. Would this be done using VB Script commands,
or has that gone obsolete?

I have done automation of Excel and Word from Access, and am thinking
another way might be to have the button be used to export all the objects to
the assigned backup Access application. Is this a reasonable plan, or would
it be simpler to find a way to copy the application as a single file?

One suspected cause of crashes: folks not turning off the application when
shutting down (one can only do so much nagging about this practice), or
something flaky in the network that causes the equivalent. I do have an
automatic shut down feature in the app for workstations where the app goes
unused for a given time period, and this has helped a lot.

- Phil Freihofner

 

[Jeanette Cunningham]

Hi Phil,
your description makes no mention of a back end and front end setup. If you
have not split the database and all users are using the some frontend, you
will get a lot less corruption if you split the database. Here is a
description of how to split a database.
http://allenbrowne.com/ser-01.html

To backup a split database, you need only backup the backend where the data
is.
You can make a backup by making a copy of the backend and saving it in a
safe place.
For best results for a backend that is usable in case of corruption - only
copy the backend when none of the front ends are open. If you copy the
backend while someone has the database open, it is very likely that you will
not get a usable backend because you created a copy while the data was being
written to the backend.


Jeanette Cunningham MS Access MVP -- Melbourne Victoria Australia