VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

Backing Up Your Data

VSys Administrators are responsible for ensuring the system database is intact in the event of an emergency, hardware failure, or just to move it to another location. Backing up the database is critical in any of these situations and it should be performed on a regular basis.

A VSys backup is one or more zip files containing encrypted and compressed copies of your data. When it comes time to restore from a backup, you must use VSys One's restore mechanisms. You can't just unzip the backup to overwrite your existing tables.
Backups can be run while other users are in VSys. There is no need to have other users exit VSys while you are making your backup.
You can run this function at any time during the day. We recommend that you make a backup of everything daily.
Backups can be run as a Scheduled task. This lets you run them using Windows scheduling tools.

If you use GMS as well as VSys, be sure you always use VSys for your backups, as VSys backups fully back up both VSys and GMS data. GMS backups have only limited VSys information and cannot restore your complete VSys data.

Steps in this task

Open the Back up your data tool from the Administrator tools panel.

By default, all of the tables except for "trace", "voxilogs" and "zips" are selected to be backed up. With the exception of those tables, you'll generally want to back up all of your tables.

Select your options.

Field Names	Definitions and Comments
For portrait photos, only back up photos added recently	Check to include a person's photos that you added recently. If you check this, VSys will let you enter the date range that you consider "current". Note the backup file created then may be missing important data, such as the older, existing images that weren't in the date range.
Omit scanned form images and comment photos	Check to leave out scanned images associated with certifications and any images attached to comments. Note the backup file created then may be missing important data. All comments and scanned certification images would be excluded.
Split multiple files if one file would exceed a specific size	Check to break the backup into multiple files if the backup file is very large and exceeds the size you specify in the Maximum size field. You must archive all of the files that VSys makes here in order to restore the backup later.
Encrypt this backup	Check to encrypt the data. Enter a password, which must be identical in both fields. If you lose or forget the password, your file cannot be restored.
Use maximum compression	If this is checked, VSys will use a non-standard but highly effective mechanism for compressing your backups. The backups themselves are still `.zip` files, but the tables within them can only be restored by VSys version 2.1 or higher.
Use advanced encryption	Only available when using maximum compression, using this creates backups where the underlying tables are encrypted using AES 256. Only VSys One version 2.3 and higher can restore these backups.
Comments	Anything you need to note about this backup.

Enter the name of your backup file in the Backup file to create field. You can use the icon to browse to the appropriate folder.
To begin the backup process, click the Run button. VSys will indicate its progress as it backs up individual tables.
When done, a message will be displayed showing that the data was successfully backed up along with the name and size of your backup file.

Magic: When VSys One makes a backup, it stores the data as embedded NexusDB tables. VSys can restore these tables to any of its compatible databases. This means you can use the backup/restore process to make a backup on one system in NexusDB, then restore it under SQL Server. Or go from SQL Server to NexusDB. VSys treats them all alike.