Vault Utilities

Your design data is probably your single most valuable asset.  Even thinking about the cost of replacing it is mind blowing.  In many cases historical data and product knowledge has long since left the company and the only information you have left is a digital model.

With that happy thought, "backups" should not be something taken lightly.  Disaster recover is all too real for many companies in Canterbury following the recent earthquake.

To address some of the common questions, CADPRO have written a couple of utilities to help with your Vault backups.  If you stop reading here - do one thing before the end of the week:  Check your existing backup can be recovered.  Simulate a real disaster - unplug your work computer and pretend its crushed under a ton of rubble.  Can you get back up and running now?

Vault Backup

This is a cascading backup tool.  It will backup your Vault into a folder called "A".  Tomorrow it will move the contents of "A" into "B" and then perform another backup.  The following day it'll move "B" into "C" and so on... 

On the fourth day, the contents of "C" is deleted before "A" and "B" are shuffled down into "B" and "C" respectively.  In this way, you always have the last 3 days backups available at any time.

This Vault Backup tool generates a log file whilst the backup is running, and on completion (success or failure) that log file can be emailed to you using the following tool - CPS Mini Mailer.

CPS Mini Mailer

In an effort to find a simple way to send data automatically from a remote site, the CPS Mini Mailer is the answer.  Whilst not very sophisticated (yet) it does allow emails to be sent Exchange 2008 server, as well as Google Mail.

Heres a breakdown of the switches

CPS.MiniMailer.exe

  • -h Displays list of switches
  • -srv SMTP server address or name
  • -p SMTP Port number
  • -t Mail To (multiple addresses separated by commas
  • -f Mail From
  • -sub Subject (enclose sentence in double quotes)
  • -b Body (if HTML mail, can be html formatted string)
  • -du Domain user (Exchange) or user name (GMail etc)
  • -dp password for -du
  • -html 1 for HTML formatted mail, 0 for plain text
  • -a Attachments, surround paths with double quotes, multiple files separated by comma's

 

Included with CPS Mini Mailer comes a config file, CPS.MiniMailer.exe.config and all the above values (apart from attachments) can be preset there.  If you pass CPS Mini Mailer a switch, it will override the config value with your switch - so you can leave the defaults in the config file, or override them with your own - really useful for subject, body etc.

To edit the config file, open it into notepad, and find the relevant setting (so for the From setting look for <setting="From" serializeAs="String"> )and then edit the the text between the <value> and </value> tags.

An example of a command line (or batch file) using GMail is:

CPS.MiniMailer.exe -srv smtp.gmail.com -p 587 -f mylogin@gmail.com -t blogs@cadpro.co.nz -sub "Test Gmail Mail" -du mylogin@gmail.com -dp myPassword

And for exchange

CPS.MiniMailer.exe -srv myExhcnageSrv -p 25 -f myname@mycompany.com -t blogs@cadpro.co.nz -sub "Test ExchangeMail" -du myDomainName -dp myDomainPassword


Questions on either utility can be addressed to support@cadpro.co.nz, via our blog pages for backup script or CPS Mini Mailer, or logged through our contact page.

Download Vault Utilities