Create Access Database Backup – Manual & Automatically

You should regularly backup your database to safeguard your data from any uncertain data loss situations. Backup saves your money and precious time invested on the database to build it. Without backup, it’s like nightmare to recover data from loss or corrupt Access database file. An Access database gets corrupt or damaged to several reasons, as explained here and you can easily repair corrupt database by reading this article. If you are database administrator then it’s your responsibility to take backup of database on regular time interval and make sure that backup is working perfectly. Time interval for backup update depends upon your business requirement need.    

Backup an Access Database: You can create backup of an Access database manually or automatically. Manual backup creation of database is very easy and essential; there is some 3^rd party software that performs automated backup of file system. You can also use DropBox directory for online backup. To do this, you need to copy the database file into your DropBox directory. If you don’t know about this (read here), it is a great piece of software that synchronizes the files & folders on your machine to the Internet (Online).   

Create Database Backup Manually: It is very easy and quick process. It just takes around 30 minutes to accomplish the backup process and these 30 minutes can save your valuable time and some dollars. Please note that backup process time duration may be higher for the larger database. Following steps are required to be done to create a backup of an Access database. 

• Open your Access database that you want to create backup.

• Click on the Office button and go-to the ‘manage’ tag.
• Click on the ‘Back Up Database’ from ‘Manage this database’ tab.

• Now ‘Save as’ dialog box will be open. Choose the location where you want to save the backup and review the name of database, by default MS Access named the backup as database name with the date and it is the good idea. It helps during the database restoration process. If you want to change the database backup name then change it. It’s totally depends upon you.

• Done 

Create Database Backup automatically when Database is Open: Follow below steps to accomplish the automatic backup of your database.

1. Create a table within your Access database and named it as BackupDetails.
2. Add a VBA module with code.
3. Now create macros that automatically run when Access database is loaded. To create macros, see the follow the following steps.

Create Tab ->Macro->Named the Macro

Important Tips:

• Add database backup as a regular task in your daily routine.
• If your database contains sensitive information then encrypt it with password.
• For safely purpose, make an offsite backup of your database.