RE-INSTALLATION OF DELETED DATA

[G.Scott]

At FBC Oak Ridge, PCP is installed on a single host computer with drive-mapped connections via Ethernet to other office computers. The host is protected by Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, which now provides both automatic backup and internet security functions.
A recent sequence of failures included power loss to the UPS serving the host, which had an undetected dead battery and could have interrupted an Acronis and/or Windows update. The host machine was locked up and ultimately required a Windows Reset to resume normal operation.
Although Reset is supposed to remove applications while leaving files intact, we saw significant deviations. PCP survived and remained operational. No issues were found for a few weeks until we went back to look at some earlier data and discovered it wasn’t there! Several full system backups were performed with Acronis while trying to sort out the situation.
To see actual views of the system at various times, we set up an idle computer as a “dummy” host and simulated rebuilding by loading the backups in a sequence. The “best” backup that we found contained all the correct data except for the interval 12/30/22 to 2/08/23. We have that data also, but it appears on a backup that is missing everything after 2/28/23.
We have extracted various reports for contributions and fund accounting and resigned to manually restoring the appropriate PCP entries. We have all the versions of the data files in their native form, as created by the program.
Question (finally!): Does anyone have or know about an editorial process that would enable combining our two sets of data files to restore the correct and complete set for our system?

[NeilZ]

At FBC Oak Ridge, PCP is installed on a single host computer with drive-mapped connections via Ethernet to other office computers. The host is protected by Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, which now provides both automatic backup and internet security functions.
A recent sequence of failures included power loss to the UPS serving the host, which had an undetected dead battery and could have interrupted an Acronis and/or Windows update. The host machine was locked up and ultimately required a Windows Reset to resume normal operation.
Although Reset is supposed to remove applications while leaving files intact, we saw significant deviations. PCP survived and remained operational. No issues were found for a few weeks until we went back to look at some earlier data and discovered it wasn’t there! Several full system backups were performed with Acronis while trying to sort out the situation.
To see actual views of the system at various times, we set up an idle computer as a “dummy” host and simulated rebuilding by loading the backups in a sequence. The “best” backup that we found contained all the correct data except for the interval 12/30/22 to 2/08/23. We have that data also, but it appears on a backup that is missing everything after 2/28/23.
We have extracted various reports for contributions and fund accounting and resigned to manually restoring the appropriate PCP entries. We have all the versions of the data files in their native form, as created by the program.
Question (finally!): Does anyone have or know about an editorial process that would enable combining our two sets of data files to restore the correct and complete set for our system?

The only such process would involve contacting Powerchurch directly, and seeing if they can merge the data files.

All that said, this is why we advise to use the built-in Powerchurch backup module along with system wide backups. Using Powerchurch Backup would insure that the data is properly backed up and in a format easily restorable to the system. You can automate the backups using the standard Windows 'Task Scheduler" so that the process runs on whatever schedule you setup. I normally setup a schedule to backup on the days that our secretary/bookkeeper is in the office (3 days a week) and Sunday evening to pickup the Contributions entry.

This may seem excessive, but I find that this method has saved my bacon many times over the years. I normally delete these backups when they're 6 months old, so in January, I delete backups done in the previous June. In February, those in July, etc.

[G.Scott]

Thanks for reading. We will be more diligent using the PCP backups in the future! Did it that way originally and then got lazy with the system backups. The system backups saved us back in 2015 when we had a ransomware attack. I'll copy my story to PCP and see what they might contribute.

[NeilZ]

Thanks for reading. We will be more diligent using the PCP backups in the future! Did it that way originally and then got lazy with the system backups. The system backups saved us back in 2015 when we had a ransomware attack. I'll copy my story to PCP and see what they might contribute.

The system backups do help get everything back to a point, but the PCPlus backups provide a better way to restore your critical data. My suggestion is to get either a 2 TB flash drive, or an external USB drive to use as your PCPlus backup location. I've also used 'cloud' storage at one location using a OneDrive setup. It does make it easier.

[G.Scott]

We use a pair of 2T external drives that are attached to the host on alternate weeks and programmed to back up the full host system on Saturday evenings (so I can exchange them on Sundays). I can easily add the PCP backups to these drives. There is space enough to back up PCP everyday. (The host system data load runs around 180 GB until I remind someone to clean up a bit!)