Shell-shocked! You never know when disaster will strike

I was looking forward to a normal day when the call came in.  I just got out of the shower and my wife’s phone was on her nightstand ringing.

“Can I talk to Mom?” my daughter said.  I walked the phone down the hall to hand it my wife.  As she spoke she stayed calm but it didn’t sound good.

Our daughter had been in an accident. Our Honda was crumpled and un-drivable but Thank God she was not injured, and neither were the people in the SUV.

Fast forward a few hours and my wife and I are on our way to the body repair shop so they can begin repairs.  I’m waiting patiently for the pedestrians to cross in front of me before I make a right turn. When suddenly BAM!  We get rear ended in a 3 car accident.  The car behind us runs into us after she got rear ended.

Thank God for no injuries.

Now our Toyota has to go the body repair shop for repair.

2 accidents in one day can cause you to feel a little shell-shocked. I had not been in an accident since I rolled my Dad’s VW when I was 18.

I'm feeling like, ok when will the next accident happen?

The unexpected can happen at any time, that’s why it’s so important to have insurance.

You need to insure against losing your data too.

Please make sure you back up your data every day. The best practice is to make sure it’s backed up off site.

At a bare minimum get a copy of your data off your computer and onto to an external flash or hard drive.

I made a video that shows you much of what I describe below:

In order to save and backup your TATEMS data, you need to make a backup copy of a file called tatems2005be.mdb.

tatems2005be.mdb is the file that contains all the data you entered into the program.

This file is in the folder

C:Program FilesTATEMS 2005

Or the folder below on a 64 bit system

C:Program Files (x86)TATEMS 2005

TATEMS must to be closed on all computers whenever you backup or restore this file.

If you ever have to reinstall the program, you will need to restore this file back into its folder after reinstalling in order to work with the backed up data.

A couple of additional things need to be addressed here. There is a Backup and Compact feature in TATEMS under

Tools->Backup and Compact.

You can see this feature in action if you go to TATEMS Training Videos then click on the “Backup and Compact data” link

The Backup and Compact feature only allows you to backup the data to the same folder where the data file is housed.

So if the data file is in

C:Program FilesTATEMS 2005

then the backup file will be created in that folder.

The backup file will be Date/Time stamped within the actual file name. It will look something like this:

tatems2005be7-19-2006-09-12.mdb

The 7-19-2006 is the date part and the 09-12 is the time part in 24 hour time (9:12AM).

This can be useful if you want to go back to a “point in time” backup to see where some mistake was made or something went wrong.

These “point in time” backups and any backups for that matter should be moved off the hard drive to a CR-R, a Zip drive, USB drive or memory card for safe keeping.

The “point in time” backups should also be moved off your hard drive because they can quickly start taking up space, especially if you do them on a daily basis.

You can always link to a point in time backup by using the Networking Tool in TATEMS.

Under: Tools->Networking. This will allow you to see what's in a file without having to rename it.

Regardless of which approach you use to backup your data, you should do it on a daily basis.