February 22nd, 2021

Miss Honey is about to remove a bunch of old titles from her catalog. But there's one thing she should do beforehand: run an archive.

Go Cloud Hosted and let us take care of your archives and backups!

An archive is a complete copy of your Alexandria database that can be used as a restore point in the event that your data is lost or damaged. It's a quick and automatic way of saving your database before making any large changes, such as performing an import, utility, update, or upgrading your machine.

An archive is not a backup, but it can be used as a backup once you've copied it to a secure, offsite location. This way, if the computer running Alexandria is damaged or otherwise inaccessible, the data you saved offsite will still be available to you. Read Back Up Your Data for more information if you're self-hosted. If you're cloud-hosted, we take care of your backups!

Run an Archive

In v7, Alexandria no longer prompts you to run an archive before imports and utilities. Archives are a full copy of the entire database, so running too many can take up a lot of space on servers. Alexandria will only hold a certain number of archives before removing older ones.

An archive is automatically run every night during daily maintenance. If you are self-hosted, keep your server on at night for this reason.

There are two places you can manually run an archive if you need another:

In v6, Alexandria will still prompt you to create an archive before imports and utilities. To manually run an archive, go to File > Archive Now.

Restore an Archive

Keep in mind that while you can restore your last archive, anything that happened after the last time it ran—checkouts, holds, etc—will be lost. You can restore archives from 

Administration,

meaning you need to belong to a security group with a high security level, such as District Admin, in order to do this. If you need to restore an archive, we recommend you 

call Customer Support

for assistance.


Still on version 6? Learn about switching to Alexandria 7!