Disaster Planning for Macola

[AKPolarBear]

Ok, I know that's an oxymoron.
I am working on a Disaster Recovery / Backup plan should we loose power or have to shut down for an extended period of time. (A local volcano may prompt this event). If the servers here go down, the branches will be cut off and effectively will also be shut down as far as Macola goes. We are Citrix based so all servers are in one location and all users use thinclients, not PC's.
What can be done to keep them minimally operating with basic information?
I was thinking that if I could export/copy just the customer, inventory and pricing data into a Access data base, then the local users could access that information through Access using forms or something else like Crystal on a single PC. I would need to automate the process so the Access databases could be updated daily at each branch location. This is only to give them something to work with for a short duration. I don't like the idea of printing the information weekly at each location as that would just be a waste of resource. However, printing the information once when needed would be a viable option.
Any other thoughts or suggestions? What are others doing for this type of problem?

 

[kscheeler]

Are you using Macola on Btrieve or SQL. SQL gives you more options with disaster recovery. Macola doesn't support replication in SQL (because the tables don't have primary keys) but you can have a backup of the database being stored at an offsite location or being restored to a test/backup server at another location.

Another option is to have your servers hosted off site. I have one client who has 6 different sites connecting to Macola where the servers (macola, sql, pdc, 6 citrix servers etc..) at an AT&T hosting facility. They connect in remotely to do maintenance and really haven't had to go onsite that often.

Obviously, each option has a benefit and a cost so you have to factor everything in.

Kevin Scheeler

 

[AKPolarBear]

We are using SQL, hence the thought of using Access on say a laptop or PC.

I only want to be able to lookup basic information so we can manually operate until the system is restored.