Cumulus Support

Hi,

Is there a way to get Cumulus to do a timed backup (say every 24hrs)
of the data files into the backup folder?

Rather than having to restart Cumulus to get it to do a backup.

I've just had to roll back to a set of data backups from the 13th Feb
as these were the last backups I had.

So am now missing 9 days of data

The reason I had to reload a backup set of data was because
my weather station all of a sudden had a rainfall reading of 9779.3 mm !!!!

I use Smartsync.....it backs up the whole Cumulus directory successfully.

I'm looking into an option to take one of the "backups" every night just after midnight (or just before?) in addition to the start-up ones. But you can of course always do a manual 'rewind' by stripping the data files back and setting the 'timestamp' in today.ini. It's best to go back to just after midnight, then you don't have the problem of the highs/lows for the day so far not being available in today.ini.

But I should add that the Cumulus backups are only for 'rewinding', and everyone should really use something like Smartsync* as Terry suggests and do proper full backups independently of Cumulus.

*other products exist, including free ones

Find backup software that uses Volume Shadow Copy service (VSS) technology as this will backup open/in use files as well.

I schedule a daily backup using the cumulus toolbox.

I schedule a daily backup of my Cumulus data file with FBackup4. It is a free program and can be used to schedule many different backups.

A link: http://www.fbackup.com/

Thanks for all your replies.

I have decided to give "fbackup" a go and see how I get
on with it.

Just one question to BNWRX,

Can you get fbackup to do incremental backups with a new
file name each time?

As I have just used the setup wizard and it did a backup
called 1_C.zip then I pressed the [Backup] button again to
see what it does... and it then created a file called 2_C.zip,
but the origional 1_C.zip is no longer there!

Obvioulsy I would like to have a new backup each time
but keep the old ones too, to just incase the new backup
has some dodgy data in it.

Incremental: yes
Different file names : I don't know

bnwrx,
Thanks for the reply.

hills,

Does the Cumulus toolbox, backup to a new filename each time?

i.e

21-02-2011.zip
22-02-2011.zip
etc..

or does it just overwrite the original backup?

Solorize wrote: Does the Cumulus toolbox, backup to a new filename each time?

Yes

Zips up the files and names them CumulusDataBackup_YYYY-MM-DD-xx.zip where xx is a version number if you are doing hourly backups.

daj wrote:

Solorize wrote: Does the Cumulus toolbox, backup to a new filename each time?

Yes

Zips up the files and names them CumulusDataBackup_YYYY-MM-DD-xx.zip where xx is a version number if you are doing hourly backups.

There you go, answered by the author.

I back it up to a shared network drive so if I completely lose my disk I can still recover the data.

Thanks DAJ & hills,

I have just set it up to do hourly backups to see if it works.

Fingerscrossed, as it will be very helpful.

I pressed the [Backup Cumulus Now] menu item and it has
backup up a *.ZIP file so hopefully it will back up each hour.

I will check back in a bit to make sure, then will probably
set it to just backup each day at 23:58

Ok I had a look this morning and I do not have a backup.

I have reset the Backup to a new time but when that time
is reached nothing happens.

I have tried restarting Cumulus Toolbox, and then adjusting
the time again, to a few minutes ahead of the actual time and
watched to see what happens when that time is reached,
but still nothing happens

I have the Enabled box ticked under the [Backups] tab
I have also looked at the Console tab on the front of
Cumulus Toolbox, but there is no mention of a backup.





FYI. I have the 7zip.exe file in my cumulus folder, and if I press the "Backup Cumulus Now"
from the file menu, it works, the only problem is that the timed backup does not work.

Has anyone got any ideas why this is not working for me?
or what I need to do to get it to work, if I have missed
some setting

Have you setup the options in the General Tab?

It needs to know where your Cumulus.ini file is (which I guess it already does) and also where the PHP webtags file is?

Are you using PHP webtags file?