If you create or take over a Microsoft Access application from someone else, you become responsible for the data in addition to the application and its queries, forms, reports, macros, and module code. Unanticipated disasters can occur, so it’s important to prepare before they happen. The amount of effort and investment to spend for disaster recovery varies with the value of the application, but some basics apply to all applications.
A Disaster Recovery Plan is much more than making backups of your database. And if your backups are on the same machine and/or hard disk as your production database, that doesn’t qualify.
Read our paper on Creating a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan for Microsoft Access Database Applications for ways to limit your risk and headaches, while providing a professional solution for your end-users, boss, and clients.
I gave a well-received presentation on this topic at the Portland (Oregon) Microsoft Access User Group Conference. One thing I didn’t emphasize in my original paper (since revised) is that it’s critical your database backups be on another machine from the production version. if it’s on the same hard disk, it really doesn’t qualify as a backup since the attempt to recover from hardware failure isn’t mitigated.