X17 Project Management and Backing Up

[Electromen]

X17 Project Management stores all your project files on C Drive.  Archives and Chief Auto Backups are zipped/compressed.

If you’re using a 3rd party backup utility to Backup C Drive, it also compresses the files meaning they have been compressed twice.

When you go to Restore, the Chief Archives and Backups have been destroyed.  You cannot uncompressed a file that’s been compressed twice.

If you’re unfortunate enough to have C Drive destroyed, you may be out of luck.

For that reason, I’ve turned Project Management off and have .plan and .layout file stored on Drive D.  That way, files are on two different drives.

i don’t use a Backup Utility, I use a Sync Program that mirrors both Drive C and D to a Drive encloure near my internet router.  No compression.

Edited Sunday at 09:56 PM by Electromen

[Smn842]

12 hours ago, Electromen said:

You cannot uncompressed a file that’s been compressed twice.

 

Yes you can.

 

In fact many file formats people use on their PCs are already compressed such as many image and video formats, Office files (zipped xml) etc and these are regularly compressed in various backup software formats/zip files and in certain network transfer operations, and yet can still be restored and read by the application.  

 

If your restore produced corrupt files it was for some other reason such as the backup was taken of already corrupt files,  or not backing up all the required files and folders (which is why full drive imaging backups are so good).

[Electromen]

3 hours ago, Smn842 said:

 

Yes you can.

 

In fact many file formats people use on their PCs are already compressed such as many image and video formats, Office files (zipped xml) etc and these are regularly compressed in various backup software formats/zip files and in certain network transfer operations, and yet can still be restored and read by the application.  

 

If your restore produced corrupt files it was for some other reason such as the backup was taken of already corrupt files,  or not backing up all the required files and folders (which is why full drive imaging backups are so good).

Goof to know. My experience with that is from several years ago and involved Quick Books Pro

[ClintonM]

18 hours ago, Electromen said:

X17 Project Management stores all your project files on C Drive.

 

18 hours ago, Electromen said:

For that reason, I’ve turned Project Management off and have .plan and .layout file stored on Drive D.  That way, files are on two different drives.

I would suggest checking out the new preferences found under Preferences > Project Management.  The 'Local Storage' preference allows you to configure where--and to what drive-- Project Management files are saved.  We strongly recommend not storing these files in a location that is backed up to the cloud.  Additionally, there are preferences to configure the location where backups are stored.  To mirror how you worked in X16 and previous, you could change the 'Local Storage' preference to save Project Management files to your D drive and save backups to your C drive.  Hopefully the available configuration fits your needs.  Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

[Renerabbitt]

58 minutes ago, ClintonM said:

We strongly recommend not storing these files in a location that is backed up to the cloud

You CAN however safely write a script for task scheduler to backup these files to another drive when chief architect is not running

[JiAngelo]

I thought when you stacked compression methods the result needed to be decompressed in reverse order.

[Smn842]

9 hours ago, JiAngelo said:

I thought when you stacked compression methods the result needed to be decompressed in reverse order.

 

Yes they need to be decompressed in reverse order if different compression systems were used. 

 

As a general comment to this thread, as a software developer myself I've seen the chaos that can be caused by various cloud/network sync programs moving content about when programs are in use, hence files may be partly/fully locked or have data pending to be written to them.   

 

Unless an application supports a technology like VSS on Windows which allows applications to get their data in a consistent state before backup (most understandably don't) then the best approach is to backup when no user programs are running and to use full partition/drive imaging as nothing can be missed.  I do this across all my PCs either waking them up at night (wake on LAN) to backup then shut down again or on sleep/shutdown.   With incremental backups this is fast once you've got the main one done and with modern hardware even the main one can be pretty quick.  The backups reside on a PC on my local network with the most critical synchronised to the cloud (AWS in my case) without any of the issues of doing this off the live original PC.