It took me 24 hours to come up with the right adjective, but I ended up with "catastrophic" data loss. During a routine upgrade of RE, our database was lost, the backup overwritten, and the manual backup failed. It fell into a Bermuda Triangle in my MIS department. I only heard "this has never happened," and "this should not have happened." But now I have to make it all happen again. The data file I have is the original file used to migrate to RE in Dec 2004. I lost everything done in the coversion process and four years of records/maitenance. I now have to rebuild. Has anyone ever written a plan for conversion or recovery/restoration that they would be willing to share. It is so overwhelming that it is hard to know where to start. Well other than with a bottle of tequila... Emotional as well as techincal support welcome.

Hi Donna:  Did you just apply the 7.84 patch for Raiser's Edge? 

Robert

 PS: Why does this say I'm posting @ 2:29AM? 

No establish plan of recovery in writing but we make it a practice to do a database restore to a different directory and attach the database on the console.  By doing so we can see if your backups are working.  It's done every four months as a standard practice.  Not much now that you lost everything but I will take you on the "ottle of tequila"

My sympathy.  Are you looking for advice on how to recover your four years of missing data, or how to avoid this to happen again ever?  Testing your back up on a regular basis as suggested above is a very basic thing to do. 

In terms of lost data, well, it depends on the volume you have.  For a small volume and if you have paper back up, you could hire someone to do some very basic gift entry, such as amount, C,A,F - forget the details, to speed up the process. I believe it is also possible to send your data outside for address correction once everything is re-entered.

Good luck though.

 Ouch. This is a painful story to hear. We tape backup every night. Additionally, I regularly copy the backup files every two weeks on two different sets of zip drives and take one set home. The most we could lose is about 2 weeks of data, and this would be horrendous. I can't imagine four years worth. I test backups less frequently. Your story has inspired me to increase my backup testing. Wishing you the best.

Not to scare anyone even further than this story already did but please please please do not simply rely on the fact that something is backed up to a tape and tapes are saved, sent off site, etc.  If you are not testing your backups you could be in big trouble.  Somewhere on the BB site I remember reading a story about an org that regularly backed up to tape for 6 years but never tested the backup.  The day they needed it when their database crashed, they found out that the tapes they were so careful about