Click 'Install' and then click 'OK'

Click 'Done' and then close the next window.

How to MANUALLY backup your Power Broker \BRO directory using Winrar


Open Windows Explorer.

To open Windows Explorer, right click on 'Start' and left click on 'Explore'.


Go to the network drive of your server and find the \BRO folder.
Right click and choose 'Add to archive'

Type in a name that includes a date for future reference and click 'OK'.

The next window will display it's progress and let you know how much time is left for the backup.

Types of External Hard Drives:

These types of drives can be purchased at your local electronics store.
 

There are two typical types of external drives that I'll be talking about. 

The picture of the large black box type of external hard drive would last years and years and you wouldn't really need to worry yourself about disk drive space as a general rule.  It's more expensive, it's larger to transport, but will handle data faster and be an advantage if you plan on backing up other office data like images, spreadsheets, and loads of other types of files.  They come in all shapes, sizes and colors.  They would be about the size of a pound of butter.







The second type would be a memory stick.  This wouldn't last you as long since the hard drive is rather small and would wear out faster and you would have to watch the amount of data that's on the drive allot closer than the larger drive.  It's less expensive, it's easy to transport, but is slower to copy too and would be a disadvantage if you plan on backing up loads of other files like images, and spreadsheets.  They come in all shapes, sizes and colors.  They would be about the size of a roll of LifeSavers.






When you purchase which ever you plan on purchasing, you should purchase TWO of them.  You would want to leave ONE at home OFF-SITE, and the other would go to the OFFICE. 

This way, after a few days of doing your backup, you can bring the one from HOME into the OFFICE and switch them so that the one that was at the OFFICE goes home with you.  I NEVER have both drives in the same place at the same time.  I immediately bring the backup to my vehicle in case of an earth quake, fire or some other mother nature kind of thing.

HOME:


OFFICE:



How to MANUALLY copy your backup to an External Hard Drive


In the root of the drive of where your \BRO folder is, you should see the backup you just created.

Your options are to either copy or cut the file, and then paste it to the external drive.

Right click and 'Paste' your RAR'ed backup file to your external hard drive.

Due to the fact that the name will be different every time you paste a backup file to your external hard drive, you'll have
many sets of backups....which is a good thing.

You will however eventually need to clean things up by keeping one or two copies from each month but deleting the others.

Eventually, you should be able to see years of older backups which someday may prove to be handy...

_________________________________________________________________________________________


How to Automatically run a Nightly Alternate Backup of
Power Broker using Winrar and your Windows Task Scheduler.

Disclaimer:  Your backups should be reviewed and tested by a professional on a regular basis to ensure the integrity of your daily backup
method.  Zycomp Systems Limited will not be held responsible should you find that you used this method and your data has been compromised.

The reason why these instructions first do a backup to it's own server, and then copies the backup to the external hard drive
is that USB drives are not really the best when dealing with huge amounts of data across a network during a large Winrar procedure.
By compressing it first in Step 1, the data is not being compressed to a USB drive but to the actual server.  The server is smart as it
has RAM, and a huge brain and a large hard drive, and all that other techie stuff, where as an external hard drive or zip drive are basically
a bucket where data gets stored, not so smart...

A comparison would like if you were moving from one house to the next, wouldn't you want to pack all of your belongings
into a safe clean box before carrying it to the moving vehicle...

Before you do anything, you must:

The fist thing you need to do is open Windows Explorer, and browse to your C:\PROGRAMFILES\WINRAR directory and make a copy of RAR.EXE
and copy it to your \BRO folder on your server.  Proceed to Step 1.



Step 1
Creating a batch file - bkup.bat
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Highlight and right click and copy these next few select lines:

Highlight starts on the next line:


@echo off

del copyofbro*.rar

rar a -ep1 -r copyofbro.rar


ren copyofbro.rar copyofbro%date:~10,4%%date:~7,2%%date:~4,2%.rar

Highlight ends on the line above:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Go to Start, Accessories, and then Notepad.

Right click and paste

Save the notepad file into your \BRO directory of your server and save it as:

bkup.bat


Setting up Windows Task Scheduler
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sitting at a computer that stays on all night, go to Start, All Programs, Accesories, System Tools, and Scheduled Tasks.
Double click on 'Add Scheduled Task'
Click on 'Next' at the Wizard window
Click on 'Browse' at the 'Click the Program' window
In the 'Look In' window at the top, change the drive to where you would find the \BRO folder
Double Click the BRO folder
Find bkup.bat and double click
click on the 'Weekly' option and click on 'Next'
Select a time of day to run ( Ensure that you do not run this alternate backup at the same as other staff members are in the system, as well as not doing any other type of maintenance in the system.
Click on any of the days you wish to run this on and click 'Next'.
Type in a Windows Username and Password (confirm twice) and click 'Next'.
Click Finish.


Inner Mechanics
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When the Windows Task Manager starts the task, a DOS window will open and will start to compress all files and folders listed in the \BRO directory.

The commands listed in the bkup.bat file will name the backup to copyofbro_____.rar and will append the date in a YYYY/DD/MM format.

Example:



Time Test
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You would need to witness the first time this procedure is run so that you can time how long it will take to backup your entire \BRO folder.

To test it manually, you could right click on \BRO and choose 'Add to Bro.rar' and clock the legnth of time it takes to backup.


Step 2
Setting up your External Hard Drive

As the document list above, you should purchase a set of two or more of the same type of external drives, obviously depending on the size of your brokerage.
If you get away with the smaller USB sticks, then fine.
When you plug in your external hard drives, Microsoft Windows generally looks for a free drive letter to choose to allocate.

Just like your 3.5 inch floppy is the A drive, your local hard drive is usually C and a CD/DVD drive is usually D, the general USB drive would be the next
available letter.  In this example, we'll make it  the E: drive.

After you plug in the usb connection, and it finds the E: drive, create a new folder called Backup.  You would disconnect the external hard drive and
repeat the same procedure to the other external drives you have.

The main goal if that you have a folder called BACKUP on all of the external hard drives you plan on using in your rotation.

Step 3
Moving your backup to an External Drive - Imperative! - bkup2.bat

We need do NOT want to leave the backup on the server just sitting there from Step 1.
We want to copy the backup FROM the server TO an external hard drive so that we can take the hard drive off-site in case something bad happens
at your office and your server is no longer operable.



Highlight and right click and copy these next few select lines:

Highlight starts on the next line:


@echo off


copy copyofbro*.rar e:\backup



Highlight ends on the line above:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Go to Start, Accessories, and then Notepad.

Right click and paste

Save the notepad file into your \BRO directory of your server and save it as:

bkup2.bat


Setting up Windows Task Scheduler
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sitting at a computer that stays on all night, go to Start, All Programs, Accesories, System Tools, and Scheduled Tasks.
Double click on 'Add Scheduled Task'
Click on 'Next' at the Wizard window
Click on 'Browse' at the 'Click the Program' window
In the 'Look In' window at the top, change the drive to where you would find the \BRO folder
Double Click the BRO folder
Find bkup2.bat and double click
click on the 'Weekly' option and click on 'Next'
Select a time of day to run ( Ensure that you do not run this alternate backup at the same as other staff members are in the system, as well as not doing any other type of maintenance in the system. 

@@@@@@@
NOTE:  IF YOU REMEMBER IN THE TIME TEST PARAGRAPH, YOU LOGGED HOW LONG YOUR BACKUP TOOK. 
If your backup started at 8PM, and it takes 30 minutes, then you would want to schedule the second part of the backup to run at 9PM.
This will ensure that the second step doesn't start before the first step is completed.  ( In other words, how can the second backup procedure move
the backup if the first part isn't completed yet.
@@@@@@@

Click on any of the days you wish to run this on and click 'Next'.
Type in a Windows Username and Password (confirm twice) and click 'Next'.
Click Finish.

You should now see two events that will happen.

1)  bkup will start at 8PM Mon,Tues,Wed,Thur,Fri
2)  bkup2 will start at 9PM Mon,Tues,Wed,Thur,Fri


How to Review and TEST your Automatic Winrar/Windows Task Scheduler backup.


After a few weeks, your external hard drives should look like this:




Keep it a rule that you check the size of the external hard drive on a regular basis by right clicking the root drive letter and choosing Properties:



When you go to do maintenance, usually keep a full backup of the last month but delete two, three or four of every five backups in the rotation:
Example:




To test your backup, bring an external hard drive or zip disk home or to a stand alone computer in the office.
Do NOT use the same computer where Power Broker is installed as you may overwrite the LIVE copy of Power Broker with older data. 
Open Windows Explorer and on the root of your C: drive, make a folder called \DATA.
Connect your external hard drive to your home computer. 
Your home computer should pick up the external hard drive. 
Browse to the \BACKUP folder.
Choose one of the latest backup files, right click and copy it to the C:\DATA folder.
On your home computer, install www.power-broker.com/winrar/winrar.exe
Go back to your C:\DATA folder and right click on the RAR file and choose 'Extract to here'.
Right click over the \DATA folder and share it out to everyone with full permissions in security.
In Windows Explorer, choose Tools, Map Network Drive, and select the drive letter you use at your office.
Open your newly mapped drive, and run WORKSTATION.EXE. 
You would then find 'BROW.EXE' and right click,
and choose 'Send To, Desktop, Create New Shortcut'.

On your desktop, you should see ' Shortcut to brow.exe'.  Double click that.

When it opens, you should be able to go to Utilities, Print Data Entry Transaction Report for the day of the backup and
there should be data on the report.  If you think you created some abeyances, you could also go and run the Policies Reports
section and run any one of the Abeyance reports for the same day.





Documentation Revised:  September 9/2009