Backing Up Your PIMS Data File - Recommended Practices

Backing Up Your PIMS Data File - Recommended Practices

Overview

With PIMS, your data files house all of your critical business data.  It is important to have a strategy in place to recover data and minimize downtime in the event of hardware failure or disaster.  This article outlines what Weevio Software finds to be best practices for a recovery strategy.

Backing Up Your Data File

Do NOT use Time Machine on your PIMS Servers!  While macOS's Time Machine is a free and easy solution for backing up most Macs, it CANNOT be used on PIMS Servers at all.  Because Time Machine is constantly checking for, indexing, and backing up data changes, it tends to interfere with the performance of the PIMS Server application, and in worst cases can damage your data files.
No matter which solution or combination of solutions you choose to keep your PIMS data file backed up, be sure to always exclude both the folder that your data file is stored in and your PIMS Server application folder from backups.  Your PIMS Server application and its data file are always active, and attempting to back them up while they are active can result in data corruption and/or degraded performance.  Make sure any back up solution you deploy only runs on a schedule outside of your operating hours and does not perform continuous backups throughout the day or your PIMS Server's performance may be degraded.

Onsite Backups

Solution 1 - Bootable External Backup Drive (Recommended)

At each location, we recommend having a bootable external drive connected to your PIMS servers.  With this solution in the event of a hardware failure, you'll have a bootable drive with backups and a working PIMS Server installation that can be deployed quickly, minimizing downtime.


  1. Once your PIMS deployment has been completed, clone each of your PIMS servers' hard drives to an external drive.
  2. In the root of each bootable backup drive, add a folder named "PIMS Backups".
  3. Set up a folder in the "Documents" folder on each of your PIMS Servers' local hard drives also named "PIMS Backups".
  4. Schedule your PIMS Server applications to back up to to the local "PIMS Backups" folder daily, outside of operating hours.
  5. Schedule a software utility, such as Carbon Copy Cloner, to clone the contents of the local "PIMS Backups" folder to the "PIMS Backups" folder located in the root of the bootable backup drive daily at a time after the PIMS Server application would have completed its daily backup process.
Most data files take no longer than 10 minutes to back up; however, the duration of your PIMS Server's backup process will vary depending on the technical specifications of your server's hardware and the size of your data file.  We recommend setting this cloning process to start about 30 minutes after your PIMS Server application is scheduled to run the daily backup process.  This will make sure there is plenty of time for the PIMS Server application to start and finish the data file backup before the data is copied to the backup drive.

Solution 2 - Backup Drive only

With this solution in the event of a hardware failure, you'll have your data files safely backed up; however, your downtime will depend on how quickly you can install and deploy a new PIMS Server.


  1. Connect a drive to your PIMS Server to be used for backups.  You'll want to give it a distinctive name, such as "PIMS Backups".
  2. Schedule your PIMS Server application to back up to the external drive daily, outside of operating hours.

Offsite Backups

For your MAIN server (or businesses with a single location), we recommend also putting into place some sort of offsite backup solution to protect your data in the event that an onsite disaster would render your local PIMS server and backups unusable.  Schedule a software service, such as Backblaze, to back up your in-house backup drive to the cloud daily after your onsite backup processes have completed.  In the event of a disaster in which you would need to pull data from the cloud, you'll be able to log in and download your data file from the backup service or request an external drive containing your data file be mailed to you.