Although you can manually back up your Informant database on a periodic basis, it's recommended that you also schedule regular backups of the Informant database as a safeguard against unexpected power loss.


Managing scheduled backups is beyond the scope of what our customer support can provide since there are a wide variety of ways to perform scheduled backups. However, we'll provide some general guidance here.


Backup best practices


Regardless of how you back up your database, there are some general guidelines you should follow:


  • Make sure at least some backups are stored off-site, even in the cloud, on a server in another location, or on a disk stored in another location.
  • Store a few recent backups. If your most recent backup is no good, it won't help when something goes wrong. It's best to store at least a few recent, full backups of the database to increase the chance that you'll be able to restore the database from a backup in the event of a data loss event.
  • Check your backups: periodically restore a database backup to a new database (don't overwrite the actual Informant20 database that's in use!) to test that your backups work and can be restored.


Recommended: Use a third-party backup solution


We recommend using a third-party backup provider that supports SQL Server backups, whether cloud-based or off-site, to create periodic backups of your Informant database.


An advantage of using a third-party provider is that most third-party backup solutions can also backup your other important files.


While Informant doesn't make recommendations for which vendor to choose, as long as the backup software supports SQL Server backups and can work with SQL Server Express, it is worth exploring.


Alternative: Scheduling backups with Windows Task Scheduler


Microsoft Learn has an article providing an example of how to automate SQL Server backups with a batch file and the Windows task Scheduler here: Schedule and automate backups of SQL Server databases in SQL Server Express


The information in this article can be used to create an automated backup if using a third-party backup solution is for some reason not feasible. That said, the solution in the articles does not delete old backups, so you will need to periodically delete old backup files to retain disk space if you use this solution.