Your inventory data is one of the most valuable assets in your business. It represents years of product information, pricing, customer records, supplier relationships, and transaction history. If that data were lost tomorrow — due to a hard drive failure, a fire, a stolen laptop, or accidental deletion — how long would it take to rebuild? For most businesses, the honest answer is: you couldn’t fully rebuild it at all.
Backups are the simplest form of insurance for your data, and iMagic Inventory’s automatic backup feature makes them effortless.
The Danger of Manual Backups
Many business owners intend to back up their data manually. They’ll do it at the end of each week, or when they remember, or before a big stocktake. In practice, manual backups are done inconsistently — and the backup that exists when disaster strikes is almost never as recent as you need it to be.
iMagic Inventory’s automatic backups solve this problem by removing human memory from the equation entirely. Configure them once, and iMagic Inventory backs up your data on schedule without anyone needing to remember or take action.
What Happens If You Don’t Have Backups
The scenario plays out the same way every time: a hard drive fails, a virus encrypts your data, or a computer is dropped or stolen. IT support attempts data recovery and usually recovers something — but it’s rarely everything, and it’s rarely the current state of your data. You end up re-entering transactions, guessing at stock levels, and explaining to customers why their order history is gone.
The cost of recovery almost always far exceeds the cost of proper backups. With automatic backups in iMagic Inventory, you’re looking at a few minutes of setup time to protect years of business data.
Where to Store Your Backups
The backup file that iMagic Inventory creates is only useful if it’s stored somewhere safe — meaning somewhere other than the same computer your software runs on. If the backup lives on the same hard drive as your database and that drive fails, you’ve lost both. Good backup practice involves storing copies in at least two locations:
- External drive: A USB hard drive kept at a separate location (off-site or at home)
- Cloud storage: An automatically synced folder in Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, or similar
- Network location: A separate server or NAS device on your network
Configure iMagic Inventory to save backups to a folder that is itself automatically synced to cloud storage, and you have a simple but robust two-location backup solution.
How to Set Up Automatic Backups in iMagic Inventory
- In iMagic Inventory, go to Configure > Automatic Backup to open the backup configuration screen.
- Set the backup schedule — daily backups are strongly recommended for any active business. Choose a time when iMagic Inventory is least likely to be in active use, such as early morning or late evening.
- Set the backup destination folder. Choose a folder that is either on an external drive or synced to cloud storage.
- Set the number of backup copies to retain. Keeping at least 7 daily backups means you can restore to any point within the past week if needed.
- Save the configuration.
- Manually trigger a test backup immediately to confirm it works — look for the backup file in your destination folder.
- Check that the backup file exists and has been updated after the next scheduled run.
Testing Your Backups
A backup you’ve never tested is a backup you can’t trust. At least once every few months, verify that your iMagic Inventory backup files are present, up to date, and could actually be used to restore your system. The peace of mind from a successful test is worth the ten minutes it takes.
What to Do After a Hardware Failure
If the worst happens and you need to restore from backup: install iMagic Inventory on the replacement computer, then use the restore function to load your most recent backup file. iMagic Inventory will bring your data back to its state at the last backup point. Any transactions entered after the last backup will need to be re-entered — which is exactly why daily backups are so important.
Your data is your business. Protect it like the asset it is.
Download iMagic Inventory free for 30 days and set up automatic backups before anything goes wrong.