While losing data is something that has never happened in a serious way to a single customer of Dance Studio Manager, there are some great benefits to always making sure we have backups. We have now added an additional level to our backup system. But first it would help to explain what we have been doing already…

Cloud Servers

Our customer files and data are served from multiple servers working together. Each server has a flash drive, and if any server or flash drive fails, nothing happens! Well actually an alert is sent to the 24-hour on site staff, and the drive or server is replaced, usually within about 10 minutes. But losing a drive or server does not cause any services or data to be lost.

Near Site Backups

All files and data are then backed up daily. For any given week, we have yesterday plus a couple of other days, as well as last week and a couple of times last month. These are full server backups. This means we could restore all data from the date that data was backed up. Generally, there are about five or six full back ups.

Git Repository

Whenever our developers are making changes, every line of code is tracked and integrated into the software. Usually changes are first saved in a beta release, and then after sufficient testing are integrated with the main release. Because there is a full history of every change that has ever been made, we have the ability to back up to any point in the history of the software and make it instance of our software from this date. For example, if we wanted to see how our software I looked on January 3rd 2017, no problem. and this solution works very well with the next solution…

Multiple Database Backups

And our newest addition is multiple database backups, which are stored securely off site, with a company who specializes in storage. Similar to the server, we are taking backups daily, and at any given time, we have yesterday, plus a few days from the previous week, plus a couple of days from the previous month.

And this last edition we are excited about, because occasionally a customer comes to us because something was deleted in their account. for example, maybe they accidentally deleted the record of some transactions they had entered. now we can go back and see what the database looked like before and help them track down what they deleted.

Customer Backups

And finally, DSM customers under settings, database backup, can always take a backup of their database. Simply save this file to the computer and give it a name such as “DSM backup” and include today’s date.

More to come…

We have a few more surprises coming over the winter. There are some new tools which will make it possible to use DSM in more places, and we look forward to telling you about it soon!