TimePilot Best Practices

The Backup-Restore Utility

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Important note: Backing up transactions is a safe and common procedure, but unless you're an experienced TimePilot user, restoring them is best done with the help of a TimePilot tech support specialist. Unless you know what you're doing, restoring transactions can wipe out data you want to retain.

You’ve been using TimePilot for a while now, and there are dozens of extracted pay periods taking up space on your computer’s hard drive. But it’s just a fact of life that hard drives die. That’s why it’s important to back up your data, so that when (not if!) your drive dies and the data is no longer available, you’ll have a copy.

Backing up is as simple as copying your files to a USB drive, another hard drive, CD or DVD. TimePilot has a special program that makes this even easier: the Backup-Restore Utility. Here’s how to use it:

  1. First, shut down TimePilot Central and start the utility. You can find it here: Start > All Programs > TimePilot IV > TimePilot Utilities > Backup-Restore Utility.
  2. You’ll be asked to log in. Use the same username and password you use to log in to TimePilot Central.
  3. The Backup-Restore UtilityYou’ll see a screen like the one at right. There are three groups of choices, each in a different color.
    The first group (the green buttons) involves your Current Transactions—clock-ins and clock-outs that have not yet been extracted into a pay period. You can back them up to a USB drive, another hard drive, CD or DVD. You can also “restore” your Current Transactions. This means taking a backed-up copy of Current Transactions using them to replace the ones that are in the TimePilot database.
    The second group (the yellow buttons) does the same things as above but involves only extracted pay periods.
    The third group (the gray buttons) lets you delete backed up files or extracted pay periods.

For this article, we’ll go through two of the most common procedures: backing up your Current Transactions and backing up your extracted pay periods.

Backing up Current Transactions

Back Up Current TransactionsWhen you click the Back Up Current Transactions button, the screen shown at right will appear.

At the top of the screen is the place where TimePilot will save the backed up file. Don’t want to put it there? Want to save it to a USB drive or external hard drive? Click the little folder image next to the Backup Location field and choose where you want to save the file. If you want to put the file on a CD or DVD, the simplest process is to save the file to your desktop and then burn it to the disk. For Microsoft's instructions on how to burn CDs and DVDs in Windows, click here.

Just below the Backup Location field is the Backup File Name field. You can accept the filename that TimePilot assigns to the backup or change it. Just make sure any new filename ends in “.BAK”

When you’re ready, click the “Backup Now” button.

The bottom half of the screen shows a list of backed up Current Transactions that are available at the Backup Location at the top of the screen. When one is highlighted, its creation date is displayed in red at the bottom of the screen.

Backing up Extracted Pay Periods

You can also back up your extracted pay periods. Each backup includes the employee profiles that were in effect at the time of the extraction, so each gives you a snapshot of your company at that time.

Back Up Extracted Pay PeriodsWhen you click the “Back up Extracted Time Periods” button, the screen at right will appear.

At the top of the screen is the Backup Location field, just as described in the previous section.

Below that is a drop-down list of the companies you have set up in TimePilot (most businesses will have just one listed). Choose the company whose extracted periods you want to back up.

The extracted periods will appear in the left box; click one to highlight it, then click “Back Up Selected Time Period.” The backup copy of the extracted pay period will be created, saved to the location you specified at the top of the box and added to the list of backed up pay periods in the box on the right.

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