Backing Up Your Data

Please read the User's Guide, Chapter 1, There is Safety in Backups. We highly recommend:

This maintains father, grandfather, and great-grandfather backups in case of media damage or defect.

To Back Up the Current Data Set to a Hard Drive or Removable Device, or to Back Up a Data Set That is Not the Current Data Set:

Doing a Backup of Your Data

In an AviSys 6 backup, the selected data set is compressed and written to a single backup file on the selected destination drive. The backup file is compressed in the industry standard PKZIP 2.04g archive format. The file will be named something like JOHN.AVZ, depending on what you named the data set. Do not attempt to “open” or “run” either the backup archive file or any of the files contained in it—leave that work for the AviSys Restore facility which can do it correctly.

Important Note: We recommend that you rotate through three backup media for each data set, always selecting the oldest media for each backup. After each backup, date the media. And it is very easy, and cheap, to take one of the backup media off site, to your office, or to grandma's house, for maximum safety.

When you select Utilities | Backup Data, you are taken to a dialog where you (1.) select the data set to back up, such as C:\AVI6\JOHN, and then (2.) select the target drive for the backup—a diskette drive, a hard drive directory, or some other drive such as a properly formatted and supported CD-R(W) drive or a flash drive.

The CD must be formatted before backup. Just as if you were to try to save a Microsoft Word document to CD, the blank CD must be formatted by your CD software before it can be written to.

(CD drives are not standard Windows I/O. Each computer has special CD software installed which handles all reading and writing of files, even when you do a drag-and-drop.)

Mount the CD. In My Computer or Windows Explorer, highlight the CD drive, RIGHT-click it, and carefully select Format (by carefully, I mean be sure it's the CD drive you have selected). (If no “Format” appears on the context menu, your system's CD software has not provided that facility -- you need to start the CD software provided with your computer and perform the format there.)

You can also RIGHT-click the CD drive in the RIGHT-HAND window of the Backup dialog, and select Format from the context menu that pops up, if Format is in the menu.

Instructions for formatting a CD are also provided in a memo at the bottom of the backup dialog.

Returning to the Backup dialog, once the source data set (FROM:) and destination device (TO:) are selected, you click (3.) Back Up Selected Data Set.

If you choose to back up to a hard drive, you should select a drive other than the one on which AviSys is installed. If you back up to the same drive, a drive crash will destroy your AviSys data set and your backup -- Not Good! And remember, just because you have hard drives C, D, E, and F doesn't mean you have four separate hard drives. They could all be partitions on the same physical hard drive, and if one crashes, all of them crash!

If you do not know how to “browse” through drives and folders in the From: and To: dialog windows, please consult the Windows operations tutorial that came with your computer. “Browsing” files and folders is a fundamental Windows operation—we can't teach you how to do it, and it's pretty intuitive, once you try it.

Restore Data

This utility presents a dialog almost identical to the one described above. It restores the data from a backup diskette, or drive/directory, to the data set you select. You do not need to have that data set invoked. Restoring the current data set will not affect the data on screen until AviSys is restarted or a data set swap is done. Note: be careful that you restore to the same path the data was backed up from, such as C:\AVI6\JOHN, to be certain you don't accidentally overwrite the wrong data. Instructions are provided in each of the dialogs -- follow them carefully. Always follow with Utilities|Rebuild Sighting File Indexes.

Restoring Data if AviSys Won't Start

If the current data set is badly damaged, AviSys won't start. Thus, you can't get to the Utilities menu to do a data restore from a backup. In that case, from File Manager or Explorer, run the program RESTORER.EXE from your base AviSys directory, presumably C:\AVI6.