Who is this article for?

IT personnel responsible for managing Ideagen Internal Audit (Aura).

IT access will be required.

It is good practice to backup your Internal Audit 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 Internal Audit (Aura) database using Microsoft SQL Management Studio.

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

1. Considerations

A manual backup should be taken if you are:

• About to perform maintenance on the database server.
• About to perform an upgrade to Internal Audit.
• In doubt of the integrity of automated backups.

The Internal Audit database includes all of your data, however it is possible to store attachments on an external network location. It is recommended you have a full understanding of where your attachments are stored as additional backup measures may be needed to ensure everything has been backed up.

Any changes made to audits that have been downloaded for offline editing will not be included in the backup.

2. Creating a manual backup

It is recommended that all users are logged out of Internal Audit and that all Internal Audit services have been stopped before making a backup.

To create a backup:

1. Open Microsoft SQL Management Studio.
2. Go to Object Explorer.
3. Expand the navigation tree until you can see the PentanaAudit database.
4. Right-click the database name.
5. Hover over Tasks.
6. Select Back Up....

7. 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.
8. Tick Copy-only backup.

9. Navigate to Media Options from the left pane.
10. 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.
    • Append to existing backup set allows you to store backups performed at different times from the same or different databases on the same media.
    • 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.
11. Under Reliability, tick Verify backup when finished and Perform checksum before writing to media.
12. Click OK.

It is essential to verify that the backup has been successful. If the backup fails or is corrupted, there is no way to recover the data.

Further reading

• SQL Server Video Archive | Microsoft TechNet