Experience has shown that hard disks sometimes fail; hence you should ensure that your workstation(s) are backed up regularly. In practice you will have to ensure that two different types of backup are made:

 

 

The first of these is normally the responsibility of the system administrator, rather than the FOXMAN‑UN administrator. If your site already has a system administrator, then check how the workstations are backed up. Backup policies vary from site to site, with some sites backing up all their systems regularly, some sites only back up some of their systems, while other sites do not backup their systems at all.

In some cases you may not have a separate system administrator, in which case you will have to decide how to backup the workstation yourself (refer to Backup).

It may seem sufficient to make regular backups of the workstation, without making separate database backups. After all, the database is also stored on the hard disk, hence it will be backed up along with the rest of the data. Unfortunately this is not the case, and a separate database backup is required. The problem is that the database is likely to be active during the backup, with the result that the standard backup tools generate error messages complaining that the database files are active, and cannot be backed up.

To overcome this problem, FOXMAN‑UN offers the command “edbbackup” which will create a complete backup from a running database. As an alternative you may use the backup feature of the NEM Remote Admin Tool, which is described in section Remote Admin Tool (RAT) and in the user manual “NEM GUI Help System” [1KHW002412].

Given that the database must be backed up regularly, the first step is to determine the backup medium. FOXMAN‑UN supports backing up to a file on a hard disk. There are a number of possible options to be considered, as explained in the following sections: