Omniscient Australia - Backing up ICARE

It is expected that organisations have in place a disaster recovery policy which ensures that vital data stored in database systems is backed-up on a daily basis regardless of the applications being used to collect the information.

So which ICARE files need to be backed up?

ICARE is made up of two types of files, data and program.

Data files must be part of your back up procedures.
Program files do not need to be backed up as they can be restored using the installation disk provided.
However there are advantages for including program files in your backup procedures, most obvious reason is that in the event that you do need to restore data, you will restore the system along with the version used for recording the information contained within the data files.
Another advantage is that you you need not perform minor upgrades (if any are needed) to synchronize the restored data files with the application files.

ICARE's data files are distributed within the ICARE folder. All databases have the .ice file extension and exist within the ICARE data , institut , industry , result and system folders.

Report templates should also be backed up, these are files within the ICARE report\master folder and have the .rtf extension.

If you do not have a backup procedure or a third party application which enables you to backup your system, we have provided a new ICARE backup utility which will compress all data files into a single backup file.

This utility (a single file) can be downloaded from here and can be saved anywhere on your system.

The most convenient place is the ICARE folder however, you will need to create a shortcut to the file icarecab.exe manually.

The ICARE backup utility will accept the following arguements:

--icare folder
This sets the icare folder as folder.
--backup folder
This sets the backup folder as folder.
--scheduled
This causes the utility to run and backup with no user intervension. This is used so that the utility can be called from a task scheduler.