by TimStone » Thu Feb 09, 2017 6:50 pm
Otto,
On our installed systems, I have a program that runs 24/7 on the server with the data files. Sometime after midnight, it makes a zip file with all of the database files. The name is drawn from the date, so each day is saved independently. They can have this saved to an external drive on the computer ( mapped ). Some of my clients have swappable drives, rotating them each day for the backups.
Then, in the early morning hours, my clients upload the new zip file to a cloud storage of their choice. This could be OneDrive, Dropbox, or some other resource.
The routine that does the backup is hardcoded. It only interacts with our hosted server ( offsite ) where we place update files. It uses an FTP connection, but only downloads two files ... one with updates to the key ( encrypted ) and one with updated exe files ( archived ). Access to the hosted server account is by a complex user name / password combination.
I'm sure a hacker could penetrate this system but it's an awful lot of work just to be a nuisance. Nothing financial is available in any of this process, and there is no gain. If they were fully successful, they would only cause a small business owner the time to reformat and reload everything. Frankly, that would take less time than it would take to hack the process.
So far we have experienced no problem. Hopefully, that will continue. It is far more likely that one of my clients systems will be destroyed by lightning ( actually happened ). With this system, I can have them back up and running with a new computer in about 20 minutes.
Tim