Issue 63		SMARTS Broadcast Systems	  November  1999

BACKUPS...AGAIN... (for Version 7 users) Seriously, some of you aren't doing your backups. We ran into about five Support situations this past month, where the operator was not backing up. In one case, the operator was backing up every day, but using the same disk over and over. That won't work. Every time you back up, you overwrite whatever is on the disk. Let's review our recommended procedure for backups. You should have a set of five backup disks, labeled Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday. On Monday, backup One Month's Data, using your current month, to the disk labeled "Monday". On Tuesday, backup to the disk labeled "Tuesday". And so on. This way, if you find on Wednesday that your hard drive has gone bad, and that it was bad and you didn't know it when you backed up on Tuesday, you can restore the Monday backup. This way you won't lose more than one day's work. You reuse these disks every week, meaning that you are on a five-day backup cycle. At the end of each month, after you have closed out the month, use a different disk, and back up your month. Label the disk "October 1999 Final Backup" and keep the disk in a safe place. Additionally, if you have future months open, you should be doing an All Month Data backup. How often you do this depends on how often you are entering orders in future months. But imagine that you turn on your computer some morning and everything is gone. What will you have to fall back on??? Restoring a backup takes only a few minutes. Starting over and entering all of your data can take days. MICROSOFT DOS... We want to remind you that SMARTS-Version 7 can only be run on Microsoft DOS. When we installed SMARTS at your station, we mandated that Microsoft DOS be installed on your office machine. However, we ran into a situation this past month where another version of DOS was being used without our knowledge. Commands are different in other brands of DOS, and we have no way of knowing how our files react to them. You can check your version of DOS by going to the C> and typing VER and hitting the Enter key. If you find you are using something other than MS-DOS, you should change to MS-DOS immediately. YOU CAN'T FOOL CUT LETTERS FOREVER... One of our operators called with a conflict in co op letters. It turned out that she had entered a Rotation Pattern for cuts A-B-C for a :10 spot. She also entered a :30 Rotation Pattern for the same account. The system didn't catch it until co op was posted, and the operator tried to change a cut letter. If that is your situation, please use different letters in each Rotation Pattern for each length spot. You can fool the system up to a point, but it will eventually catch up to you. Have a great November, and good luck in the busy season of the year! Jan Schad

     OFFICE: 800-747-6278	     SUPPORT: 800-765-2935         
     SALES: 800-498-0487         E-MAIL: officesupport@smartsbroadcast.com
				 WEBSITE: http://www.smartsbroadcast.com