BusBoss: School Bus Routing Software Backups

It’s happened again.  A customer called recently saying that their server crashed and now they need help getting BusBoss back up and running.  If your Transportation Management Software does not have backup and restore functionality, please take a close look at BusBoss.

Under normal circumstances, it would be as simple as installing the SQL Server database engine, restoring the data from last night’s backup, and you’re done.

With this particular customer, they thought they were making regular backups but they weren’t.  In this case, they lost about 1 months’ worth of work.  This should never happen, but it is a common enough mistake for our customers to make.  As a BusBoss user, you may feel like you are at the mercy of your IT department, and in some respects, you are.  New to BusBoss School Bus Routing Software Version 2011, you can actually find out the last time a backup was created, and it’s super easy to do.

In BusBoss, click Tools -> Database -> Restore or click on the “Restore Database” button on the toolbar.

When you click this button, you will see a screen similar to this:

Take a close look at the dates listed in the box. The dates will be listed in descending order (newest on top). The dates that are displayed represent date and time when a backup occurred. If this box is empty, it means that your database has never been backed up. If the top item in the list is more than 24 hours old, this means that your database is not getting backed up regularly.

Backing up a database is not hard to do, however, it is extremely hard to recreate your data if there is ever a data loss.  

You need special database permissions to backup and restore your BusBoss database.  Some of our customers will already have the necessary permissions, and some will not.  If your data is not getting backed up on a regular basis, please demand that your IT department configure the system to back up the data on a daily basis.