Outlook® 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies®

Chapter 20. Maintaining Your Database

In This Chapter

• Maintaining your BCM database for good health — its and yours!

• Fixing database problems

• Moving a database from one PC to another

As you collect more and more data and it becomes more a part of the collective intelligence of your company, it's required that you, or someone like you, take charge of the proper care and maintenance of the BCM database. In the old days, computers were housed in special air-conditioned rooms with raised floors, extravagant power conditioners, and a staff that stood guard over the system 24, 7, 365. That's what it took to maintain even less powerful computers than what you can now carry under your arm!

This chapter tells you what the pros do to protect their databases against corruption, move databases from one PC to another, and take action when good databases go bad. Most people have to reenter all their data only one time before they get the Database Backup Religion. Take it from us — it's better to get in these good maintenance habits now than to rebuild your entire database later.

Note

We use the term backup to mean a copy of the data in your BCM database that includes the business contacts, accounts, opportunities, projects, project tasks, and marketing campaigns. It doesn't include e-mails, tasks, and appointments that are stored in Outlook (usually in a .pst or .ost file). We use the term restore to mean copying data from a backup file into an empty (or non-empty) BCM database. When you restore a database, ...