It’s a fact of life… nobody wants to think about a disaster happening. The thought of losing your entire project, including everything you’ve worked on in the past months or even years, is very scary. Mother Nature has been a fickle friend these past few weeks—we may be past the snow, but we’re now contending with wildfires, flooding in the southwest, tornados in the Midwest, and a hurricane season that has yet to begin. All of these can spell bad news for your project, but there are ways to protect all that hard work so you won’t have to spend one second of your summer vacation worrying whether or not your project is safe.
Recently one of our customers experienced a catastrophic data loss. But because they had a recent copy of their project on our FTP site, they avoided losing weeks’ worth of work. We want ALL of our clients to be resilient and functional in the event of a disaster, so let’s take a look at how easy it is to make a backup of your project!
1. Navigate to your Project Directory.
2. Go to the Edit menu and choose ‘Select All’.
3. Right click on the files and choose ‘WinZip >> Add to Zip file’.
4. In the ‘Add to archive’ input box, type in the path to your back-up directory and the name of the back-up file. It helps to have the name of the backup file include the date, so you’ll know when your last backup was.
** Note: You can also click the ‘New’ button, navigate to your back-up directory, and then type the name of the back-up file. This does the same thing.
5. Click the ‘Add’ button and the files will be added to the specified Zip file.
6. You can then close down WinZip; you have completed backing up the project files.
The safest place to put your file backup is in our handy Mapcom FTP Folder. Here’s how you put it there:
Mapcom FTP Upload Instructions:
- Open ‘My Computer’ or ‘Windows Explorer’
- Go to the address bar and type mapcom.com
- A box loads asking for the user name and password
- If you need it, call Mapcom Support: (804) 743-1860 ext. 240 or shoot us an email: support@mapcom.com
- Once logged in, you will see a folder called ‘Incoming.’ (PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO OPEN THE ‘INCOMING’ FOLDER)
- Grab the compressed copy of the project and database—named after the company (e.g. OneidaCounty011011.zip)—and drag and drop the file(s) on top of the ‘Incoming’ folder. There will be a progress bar indicating that the file(s) is copying to the folder
That’s it, you’re done! Your project will be safe n sound. Here in Support we recommend backing up your project several times throughout the week, but at a minimum you should back it up once a week. Do this, and you’ll be a super-prepared boy scout. A master of disasters. You’re on top of your project, and the ruler of your domain. You can take that summer vacation worry-free, knowing your project will be safe and sound when you return.