By now, we’re all familiar with cyberattacks , so it’s crucial to have anti-malware or antivirus systems installed on all devices, updated operating systems, firewalls that limit external or outgoing connections to the company, and, above all, maintain backups of our systems and environments. Therefore, here we’ll explain the importance of backing up our Business Central ERP and how to do so.
In the event of an attack, regular backups will help us revert to a restore point created for our environment. This way, we ensure that we don’t lose most of the information stored in our ERP .
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Backup Hosting
There are many environments where these backups can be stored. The recommendation is always to export them to a different environment than where your Business Central ERP is hosted . This could be on an external hard drive located in a c level executive list different physical location from where your service is hosted, a virtual hosting service, a hosting service provided by your provider, or in the Microsoft Azure environment itself .
Backup approach
Depending on the information we want to store, there are various backup approaches that can be taken. It is advisable to carry out a prior analysis of our environment and what approach to follow. Depending on the environment where our BC is located, various copies can be made. To do this, in the following point we will explain the different types of backups and different environments that exist in Business Central .
Types of backups
Complete
As the name suggests, this type of integrating automation tools backup copies all data and information from the database.
Differential
Differential backup is a type of backup performed to store data that has been modified or added to the database since the last full backup.
Incremental
Incremental backup is a type of backup that stores only data that has been changed or added since the last differential or full backup.
The main advantage of incremental backup is that it is smaller than the previous ones and the execution time is also shorter.
Business Central ERP Environments
There are two Business Central environments , on-premise and online (SaaS).
BC on premise
Depending on where the server is hosted , backups can be made in different ways or in different hosted locations.
This local environment is hosted on a server on our premises or on a cloud server , where the BC and database services of our environment will be.
To perform database backups from our environment, we can schedule them automatically. If we have a Windows operating system with SQL Server, we can schedule full and differential backups.
To do this, we can use a .bat file to specify the backup to run based on our needs. We can add the date and time of the backup, the database name, the client’s name, or whatever else we prefer to add to the backup name. Then, the .bat file will run from Windows ‘ own scheduled tasks program on the scheduled days. The backup types must be different days, either full or differential.
When restoring, we must select the backup we want to restore, either the full backup or just the differential backup.
In the case of Azure , there is a powder data service for databases that allows redundant backups to be made in the same or different locations. This is an additional service; this task can be scheduled based on the number of backups you want to make; these backups are complete.
When restoring this backup , from the Azure Portal panel where we have our contracted services, it will allow us to select the restore point we want to restore.
BC SaaS (cloud)
The SaaS environment is a service provided by Microsoft , where our environment is hosted in the cloud .
To make these backups, you’ll need to have block storage in the Azure portal , which is an additional Microsoft service . Keep in mind that there’s a limit of 10 backups per month.
When restoring this backup , Business Central will allow us to restore it to our Production or Sandbox environment .
Other ways to export data
Another option for backing up data from our environments is through configuration packages. This data can then be imported into another database or another company in our environment.