Backups are a very important when dealing with any kind of data. While we do take all precautions to protect our website, the digital world is very unpredictable and ultimately, it is the customer's responsibility to run backups. Should anything happen to our servers or if a renewal is missed, data can be lost or purged.  We encourage all customers to run regular backups of their information and save it in a safe place to ensure all the hard work of entering your inventory is never lost. 

How often you backup is up to you.  There is an old adage that says 'one should backup anything they aren't willing to lose'.  Deep, we know.  But the good news is that creating a backup in our service is both easy and fast!

On the site, we offer two options to backup your information: digital backup and readable backup.

DIGITAL BACKUP

System data backups for data restoration are handled internally and done every day.  If for any reason you feel like your data has been compromised, please contact us immediately.

READABLE BACKUP

If you want a backup that is 'readable' and even modifiable for your reference or for your own manual changes, you would use the reports feature on the site. All of our reports can be downloaded as a 'comma delimited file (CSV) which can be converted to an Excel document. One note to make is that this is not intended to be an 'offline' tool ... if you save this info to your own document and make changes to it, those changes can not be easily brought back online to update your online account.  In the case of backup, we can insert any back-up back into the system should that be necessary, but the backups are not 'readable'.

Here are the specific steps to save a report to your computer hard drive:

1. Run the customer report you wish to save. Through the Custom Reports feature, you can select which fields you wish to show.
2. Once the report has finished running, locate and click the 'EXPORT CSV (Excel)' button.
3. A dialogue window should open allowing you to either open or save the file.  You can choose to open the file by selecting Excel as the application to use.  If you save the file, pay attention to where the file is saved and the name used.  The default should be 'Collectibles_Database_[date].csv.

When you open the file using Excel, all of the columns should automatically deliminate and create a readable Excel file.

RESTORING FROM BACKUP

If for any reason your inventory looks strange when you return to your account, please let us know.  In most cases, oddities can be cleared up just by looking at them more closely.  Should there be a need to restore your account from a backup file, please contact us and we will work directly with you to get your inventory back up and going again.