For individuals, this might seems like expensive overkill in order to protect themselves against data loss. This is probably true in most cases, but we highly suggest you at least backup daily (or whenever you have made changes to your data) to a revolving set of backup media. In other words, don't backup to the same file on that USB memory stick you keep in your pocket, but instead, think about backing up to a file encoded with a date stamp, such as "mybackup_20060812", and archive that to a rewritable CD or DVD. The frequency to which you perform backups, and how often to rotate or archive a backup set is dependant on the question you should ask yourself, "What data can I live without?"
WhisperReporter uses an industry standard SQL database interface to manage the data. In a corporate environment, the company would most likely use an external SQL server which guarantees the prevention of database corruption, even through an unexpected power failure. Since using an external SQL server incurs considerable cost and maintenance overhead, we use what is called a Local Database Server. However, the drawback is the lack of the data corruption guarantee, and hence the high recommendation to backup your data on a regular basis.
Keep in mind that the Local SQL Database Server we are using in WhisperReporter is known to be extremely reliable, and the possibility of data corruption is very low. But it is more of when your hard drive will crash, not if. And of course the power might fail at the worst possible time!
So, with that said, let's move on with WhisperReporter's Data Manager.
The first dialog you will see when launching the Data Manager from within WhisperReporter using the menu sequence: File ® Data Manager is:
As the instructions say, select what you want to do with your data: Backup, Restore, Archive or Export. Make a selection and click the Next button.
See also:
Backup, Restore, Archive, Export