Forum Discussion
From End to End to Stand Aalone
Johnwilde11 That's definitely a potential problem, and one that now makes sense in the context of the original question. The issue is that backups may or may not be readily available.
I actually have a relevant story which can be somewhat illustrative.
A friend of mine hired me to assist in a data migration from an accdb be to SQL Server be for one of his clients. We did, advised him to institute a rigorous backup program and went on our way. A few months later, my friend got a panicked call from the client. He'd been attacked by ransomware and the server where his SQL Server db was installed was locked up. He formatted the hard drive and then called my friend for assistance. It turned out that his only backup of the SQL Server database was ALSO ON THAT SAME COMPUTER. He had to hire temps to reenter about 5 months of day from paper invoices.
The moral of the story is that it doesn't matter so much how often or in what format your back up as it does WHERE your backup is, and perhaps how many redundant backups you have on- and off-premises. To the later point, I had another client who used two external hard drives. He used one throughout the day to keep his office computers backed up; he kept the second at home. He brought the home one in every morning and swapped it with the one from the day before so he always had two copies, one on-premises and one off-premises.
So, I definitely get the reason for wanting a back up, or back ups, in an accessible location.
Johnwilde11 That's definitely a potential problem, and one that now makes sense in the context of the original question. The issue is that backups may or may not be readily available.
I actually have a relevant story which can be somewhat illustrative.
A friend of mine hired me to assist in a data migration from an accdb be to SQL Server be for one of his clients. We did, advised him to institute a rigorous backup program and went on our way. A few months later, my friend got a panicked call from the client. He'd been attacked by ransomware and the server where his SQL Server db was installed was locked up. He formatted the hard drive and then called my friend for assistance. It turned out that his only backup of the SQL Server database was ALSO ON THAT SAME COMPUTER. He had to hire temps to reenter about 5 months of day from paper invoices.
The moral of the story is that it doesn't matter so much how often or in what format your back up as it does WHERE your backup is, and perhaps how many redundant backups you have on- and off-premises. To the later point, I had another client who used two external hard drives. He used one throughout the day to keep his office computers backed up; he kept the second at home. He brought the home one in every morning and swapped it with the one from the day before so he always had two copies, one on-premises and one off-premises.
So, I definitely get the reason for wanting a back up, or back ups, in an accessible location.
I would be very glad of your expertise on another access matter. Is there a way of allowing the staff to enter data in the database But not allow them to get at the structure of tables, forms, etc?
Johnwilde11 Colin knows much more than I do about security. His linked resource is one of the best.
PMFJI. Not sure whether George is online as its the middle of the night in the USA.
Save your FE as an ACCDE file. This will prevent users being able to view the design of forms and reports and make all code inaccessible. Also hide the ribbon and navigation pane and consider changing the file suffix to ACCDR to simulate runtime mode.
Make sure all tables are stored in a password protected backend and locate it on a restricted folder on the network to prevent users being able to open the BE directly.
Depending on whether you are just trying to deter casual 'tampering' by end users or are concerned about 'professional hacking', you may wish to apply a range of other security measures. See my article for further suggestions: Improve Security 2 - Mendip Data Systems
