You do not want to find out the hard way.
A recent discussion with a customer about hard drive that contained all their QW 5 Application files was damaged the result of a power outage. The customer was hoping there was some way of recovering the files – 5 years of production data. We browsed their harddrive and files are gone. The customer then found out that the regular nightly backup did not include the QW 5 applications…not what you want to hear when you have an issue like this.
So I encourage you to review your backup procedures and verify these files are being stored safely away. In recent releases of QW 5 the QWAdmin asks if you wish to archive an application prior to saving the changes being made. This is a good practise as well as it stores the old application files in a directory beneath the current data directory. This does not replace a good backup strategy as it only provides a backup when changes are made.
For QW 5 applications there are multiple files associated with a single application so you must backup them all at the same time. You don’t want an application template – the definition file – out of sync with the data file.
How often should you do a backup? Well how much data are you willing to lose? Typically an overnight backup is normal but for high volume critical data shiftly might be a better strategy.
Verify your backups are being done..what have you got to lose? Just all your data if you don’t!