A Few Seconds Now...
Make an intentional choice between a) smooth sailing or b) lots of tedious work and embarrassment. Just a few seconds you invest backing up your data now will save you hours upon hours (see story below *) of tedious work and embarrassment at having to tell your group that you lost all of the group's data.
Best Practice:
Make backups to the Internet (our servers - out of reach of theft, crash, virus attack, etc.) AND to an external device such as a flash/thumb drive or external hard drive each time you add or modify information in your desktop program (viruses can reach external hard drives and flash drives that are connected at the time of the virus attack). Our server keeps the most recent twelve backups.
Good Practice:
Make backups to Internet (our servers) each time you add or modify information in your desktop program. Our server keeps the most recent twelve backups. When you add another backup, the oldest backup is deleted.
Not Recommended Practice:
Make backups to the same hard drive where your desktop program resides each time you add or modify information in your desktop program. Your data will be vulnerable to theft, crash, virus attack, etc.
Poor Practice:
Not making backups at all.
* A customer called and said that his computer with League Manager on it had crashed (could have been Handicap System or Tournament Manager desktop editions as well). The customer had not made any backups. He had scorecards from some league events...he was past event 15. His only choice to recover was to reinstall League Manager, set up the league as before including tediously typing in course data. Then he had to re-enter event scores for which he had scorecards. This is hours and hours of tedious work. It's either re-entering all data or telling his group that he lost all season data. Neither of these choices is attractive. In fact, both choices are downright unattractive. A simple backup practice that takes seconds each time would have made his computer crash a hiccup instead of mountain of anguish.
How-To Video: Back up / Restore Desktop Programs
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This video explains further.
Backup Step by Step Instructions
Restore Step by Step Instructions