[RetailEdge Moderator]

Ask yourself these questions

1. Would it be acceptable if you lost all the changes you made in RetailEdge yesterday?

If it is not acceptable, you should be backing up daily. If it is acceptable then you should consider weekly or monthly backups.

2. Am I about to make a large change to my RetailEdge Data?

If you get a RetailEdge message telling you that you should perform a backup or a message that asks "Do you want to continue?, Are you REALLY sure...?, This is your THIRD and LAST warning" you should consider making a backup. Before a data merge, import, inventory zeroing, or data purge are all good times to do backups.

3. Will I need to see this snapshot of my data in the future?

A pretty typical snapshot would be at the end of the year so you could go back to your inventory levels for tax purposes. If you think you are going to want to go back and see how things were at a particular time, do a backup.

How Long Should You Retain A Backup

You might want to keep your archival backups indefinitely. You might want keep daily or weekly backups for 6 months to a year. After six months, you can delete your daily backups and just keep weekly or monthly backups.

How To Backup

Creating a RetailEdge backup is easy. Here is the Help Link that tells you how to do it. RetailEdge will automatically prompt you to do a backup after you close for the night so you won't forget.

Automating Backups

RetailEdge does not currently provide an automated backup service. If we could come up with a more cost effective solution than what already exists we would. However there are many companies that perform automated backups (e.g., Carbonite, MozyPro, etc.) for only about $5/month. In addition, with Windows 8 and Windows 10 you can setup File History and automatically backup your RetailEdge data every day to an external drive (NAS) or computer. And if you are using RetailEdge Island you are actually getting a real time backup of your data on the Island computer every couple of minutes. Just be careful and make sure the backup process is working. Don't find out months later your nightly backups have not been occurring (a real event).