Who is this article for?

IT personnel responsible for managing Ideagen Quality Management.

IT access will be required.

It is good practice to backup your Ideagen Quality Management database regularly to ensure that in the unlikely event that you face a disaster recovery scenario you have a valid copy of the database to access.

If you are using the full version of Microsoft SQL Server, you can configure a maintenance plan to do this automatically. For guidance on this, please visit Microsoft's TechNet page

This article outlines the steps required to manually create a backup of your Ideagen Quality Management database using Microsoft SQL Management Studio.

This article is split into the following sections:

1. When to Manually Create a Backup
2. How to Manually Create a Backup
3. Further Reading

Note: For detailed instructions on managing SQL backups please visit the Microsoft TechNet website.

1. When to Manually Create a Backup

A manual backup should be taken if you are:

• About to perform maintenance on the database server
• About to perform an upgrade to Ideagen Quality Management
• In doubt of the integrity of automated backups

2. How to Manually Create a Backup

1. Open Microsoft SQL Management Studio.
2. Go to "Object Explorer" and expand the navigation tree until you can see the QPulse (or QPulse5) database.
3. Right click on the database name and select Tasks, then Back Up...

4. When the "Back Up Database" window opens you can either accept the default storage destination (normally the same install location for Microsoft SQL) or click [Add...] to add a new destination or to change the file name of the backup.

5. From the "Select a page" pane, click on [Options] 6. If an existing backup set exists in the same location you have the option to Overwrite or Append to the existing Backup set.  Select the required option.

• • Backups performed at different times from the same or different databases can be stored on the same media. For this option, select "Append to the existing backup set."
  • Selecting "Overwrite all existing backup sets" will overwrite all the backup sets on the media and preserve the media header, if any. If no media header exists, one is created.

6. Click OK to create your backup.

3. Further Reading

• Microsoft TechNet
• How to Restoring a Backup of your Ideagen Quality Management Database
• Ideagen Quality Management IT Toolkit