Oh the irony of it. As IT professionals we always harp on about backing up, continuity planing and disaster recovery, but how many of us practice it and how many of our customers don’t!

A client called us and asked us to restore our backup of their site, as they had a major outage and had destroyed thier server (where all the backups were!).  We only take copies of our clients CRM scheama when we need to test how our modifications will work with their systems, and only when we have their written agreement before hand (which on we did for this client).

We also, for this client, one that liked to fidle and modify on a very regular basis, created a little widget that automaticaly took a snapshot of the current CRM XML scheama before publishing any changes to it.  Basically, it intercepts the publish call, does a full schema export and saves the zipped file as an attachemnet and stores it in the CRM database, before updating it with the changes and publishing.

Works very well, you build up a history of the changes you’ve made and you can go back to a point in time (if you need to) see screenshot below

CRM customisations publication history

By default these are saved as attachements in the CRM database, so we have a policy of exporting them each month and saving them to a external device.  Our client had been a bit lax and hadn’t exported any of these backups since we did. The result being we did not have all the addional changes that he had made on the system. We have now been engaged to recreate them.

The moral of this story:

Backup! Save your backup somewhere safe, not on the machine your backing up.  If  its important, take two backups, its still cheaper than paying to create them twice!