Posts Tagged: manual backup

World Backup Day 2022

The 31st of March each year is World Backup Day. This day is designed to help raise awareness of the importance of keeping your critical data backed-up.

A “backup” is an additional copy of all your important files and data – for example, your family photos, home videos, documents and emails.

Instead of keeping a single copy just in one place (like your computer), the idea is that you also keep another secondary copy of everything somewhere else as well. That way, if anything should happen to the device where your original data is stored, you’ll still have a “backup” copy stored elsewhere.

Here at MIDAS HQ, we strongly believe in the importance of regularly backing-up data you can’t afford to loose. We’ve built in a number of backup features to our leading room booking and resource scheduling software to do just that!

How MIDAS backs up your data

MIDAS seamlessly makes complete and automated backups of its own database. It does this upon the first successful login each and every day. These backups are compressed, and typically backups are less than 1MB each in size. Backups are also encrypted, and stored on your MIDAS server for a length of time you specify, typically 7-30 days.

To further protect your data, these automated daily backups can optionally also be emailed daily to a specific email address too. This feature allows you to retain your own “off-site” copies of your MIDAS data within no effort!

In addition to the automated daily backups which your MIDAS system takes, we also provide the ability to instantly generate an backup at any time too! An administrator can navigate to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database, and use the one-click “Backup Now” button. We really couldn’t make it easier to backup your MIDAS data on-demand!

Restoring Backups

Database backups (whether generated manually or automatically) can be easily and readily restored at any time. You can choose to partially restore a part of a backup, or restore it in full – at any time, all through a simple interface. This may be accessed through MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Restore. So, should you ever wish to “roll back” your MIDAS system to an earlier point in time, or if you suffer a massive server failure and loose data, you can have your MIDAS system back up and running again in no time!

Database Backup and Restore in MIDAS
Database Backup and Restore in MIDAS

For more information on the backup and restore features of MIDAS, please see mid.as/help/manage-database-settings

For our “cloud hosted” customers, we also take complete database backups three times a day. A daily backup is then separately stored off-site for a period of six months.

So as you’ll see from the above features and processes we’ve built into our software, we take backups seriously! We make it painless to ensure your important MIDAS booking data can be easily backed up and restored with minimal fuss!

Whilst you can be confident your MIDAS data is taken care of, why not take a moment to backup your own important personal files on World Backup Day? Your family photos, home videos, documents and emails are important! Can you afford to loose them!? Yes, it may be a little tedious, but you’ll be glad you did should anything ever happen to your files!

How many backups of my important data should I make?

As a general rule, it’s a good idea to have at least three copies of your important data. At least one of these copies should be kept off-site or in the cloud. This is known as the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Here’s what it means:

  • Keep at least three copies of your data, including the original data and two backups.
  • Store the copies on two different types of media, such as an external hard drive and a cloud storage service.
  • Keep one of the backups off-site. Either in a different physical location or in the cloud, to protect against disasters like fire, theft, or flooding.

By following the 3-2-1 backup rule, you can ensure your important data is protected even if one copy is lost, damaged, or destroyed.

It’s also a good idea to regularly test your backups too! Testing a backups ensure they are working properly in the event you’ll need to access them. It’s important to update your backups regularly too – to keep them current.


MIDAS v3.12 is here!

We are pleased to announce the release of MIDAS v3.12!

To coincide with this new version, we’re also excited to be releasing a new edition of MIDAS, “MIDAS Lite”!

MIDAS Lite is a scaled down edition of MIDAS. It’s aimed at those who don’t require all the features of the full edition and those on tighter budgets.

There are lots of exciting new features in MIDAS v3.12 too! Notably, the ability to accept public booking requests for your rooms. There’s a host of other features including customizable print, email, and invoice templates, booking confirmations, and selective restore from backups

We’ve also updated our Video Tutorials section with three new video tutorials. There’s now over an hour’s worth of step-by-step video guides now available!

New Features in v3.12

If you’re an existing MIDAS user with a current Annual Support Package, you can upgrade to v3.12 right now! Simply login to your MIDAS, click the “MIDAS Admin Options” icon and select “Manage MIDAS -> Update”. If your Annual Support Package has recently expired, don’t worry – you can quickly renew it at https://mid.as/renew

If you’re new to MIDAS, you can check out fully-functional demos of both MIDAS and MIDAS Lite RIGHT HERE. To get MIDAS working for YOUR company/organization, head over to https://mid.as/pricing to get yourself a copy of the new MIDAS v3.12!

UPDATE: As from 1st August 2012, MIDAS Lite is no longer available, as our pricing has been restructured to make the full edition of MIDAS available starting from MIDAS Lite prices! [Read More]


Work is now nearing completion on our next release of MIDAS, v3.12. So we thought we’d take this opportunity to announce a few of the new features you can expect in v3.12

Templates

Templates

In previous versions of MIDAS you’ve been able to add a custom text footer to the bottom of emails and printouts, etc generated by MIDAS. You’ve also been able to add simple headers and footers to your invoices. For v3.12, we’ve completely overhauled this. We’ve included completely customizable templates for your printouts, invoices, and emails sent via MIDAS (previous versions of MIDAS only sent emails as plain text. MIDAS v3.12 onwards will send both plain text and HTML versions of your emails!). We’ve also provided a number of special variables you can include in your templates. For example, adding %LOGO% to your template code will display your company’s logo at that point

Booking Confirmations

Automatically Send Booking Confirmations

If an email address is held in MIDAS for a client you’re making a booking for, MIDAS will now give you the option to send an automatic email confirmation to the client when you add their booking!

Selective Restore & Manual Backups

Manual Backup

Selective Restore

Did you know that your MIDAS automatically backs up its database upon the first successful login of each day? No? Well it does! …but in v3.12 we’ve also given you a “Backup Now” button. Clicking this button will take a complete “snapshot” of your database at that point in time. Should you ever need to restore/roll back your database to an earlier point in time, MIDAS gives you the ability to restore from one of these backups. In previous versions, restoring these backups would restored everything. This included your bookings, clients, invoices, etc. v3.12 will now give you the ability to selectively restore items from your backups! So rather than restore everything, you can choose to only restore booking data between two dates, for example!

Maximum Global Occupancy Checking

Maximum Global Occupancy

MIDAS already allows you to set a maximum occupancy level (capacity) for each of your venues. If you attempt to add a booking to that venue with more attendees than its capacity, MIDAS won’t let you! We’ve extended this feature in v3.12 to include a “Maximum Global Occupancy” setting. This refers to the total number of people you can safely accommodate on site across all your venues at any one time. No further bookings can be made during periods when the estimated number of people on site is expected to exceed this limit. You can also set warning threshold to warn people making bookings when you are nearing your Maximum Global Occupancy level!

New Booking Permission

New Booking Permission

We’ve improved the “Can Add Bookings?” user permission in v3.12 to change the behavior of the booking form, on a per-user basis, from the normal form which adds bookings to MIDAS, to a similar form, but which only makes “booking requests” which have to be approved by a MIDAS user with sufficient privileges first before it is added as an actual booking! There’s more to come on “Booking Requests” too.. so watch this space!

  • More features will be announced here shortly, so be sure to check back regularly for the very latest news!
  • If you want try v3.12 now and help us test it, head on over to our BETA Test Suite