Creating a Back Up File for III

Instructions:

      Every year or six months, it's a good idea to back up III, should the system ever go down. The easiest way to store this information is into an Access database that will then let staff sort all this information by any field they wish.  Lists can also be analyzed out from the database into document form for easier access.  However, creating files this large can present some problems, and so this will have to be done in pieces.
    First, you need to run files to capture all the records in III.  Choose the largest available file (60,000) and run a search record number is not equal to nothing.  You will need to run this search at least 3 times.  If you don't have enough large files available, you will need to run the pieces one at a time.*** Very important, QVT Term needs to be set to emulate V100 terminal.  This will prevent diacritics from coming through in your exported file.
    Once the files have been run, you need to get them out of III where you can get at them.  To do this (from the Lists menu):
U > Output USER-selected format
C > CREATE a new file for output
Pick fields just as you would for listing, for this list, use:
t for title
a for author
o for OCLC #
c for Call Number (BIBLIO)
3 for Location
Next screen:
   RECORD FORMAT
1 > Field Delimiter......................................................... $
2 > Text Qualifier.......................................................... "
3 > Repeated Field Delimiter................................................ ;
4 > Maximum Field Length................................................. none
You will want your field delimiter to be something unique, so choose
1 > Field Delimiter
    2 > ASCII character change it to an "%", then
2 > Text Qualifier
    3 > None
4 > Maximum Field Length  change to "200", then
C > CREATE a new file for output

Next you will see
File creation in progress ....
File creation completed!

Output the file now? (y/n) YES
Next Screen:
1 > XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
2 > XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
3 > XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
 
 

 Key a number or
 Q > QUIT             E > ENTER a host             D > DELETE a host
At this point you will have to start up QVT/Net FTP Server to receive the file you are about to output.
Next Screen:
       FILE TRANSFER SOFTWARE

                                  Opening host
                                XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
 

          Username: XXXXXXX
          Password: .......

Next Screen:
                           Put File At Remote Site                [bin][PROMPT]
 LOCAL
 Action              Size    File Name
          1 >        204   Isbntest.out
          2 >    5357944   catback1.out
 PUT      3 >    5401212   catback2.out
          4 >      61834   ords.out
 
 

 Key a number or
 Q > QUIT                     T > TRANSFER files           P > PROMPT
 D > DISPLAY remote           M > MODE change
 Choose one (1-4,Q,D,T,M,P)
T to Transfer.
You can change the name of the file at this point if you want, you can also specify the file extension .txt, etc., which can make life simpler when you go to open the file:
Enter name of remote file
CB3.out ==> CB3.txt

Wait a few seconds, and you will get a message box confirming the transfer:

                            MESSAGE BOX

                   200 PORT command successful.
                   150 Binary connection for catback2.out
                   (XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX,XXXX)
                   226 Transfer complete.
                   5401212 bytes sent in 28 seconds (1.9e+02 Kbytes/s)
 

C > CONTINUE               S > STOP transfer
Choose one (C,S)      C to continue

Creating an Access Table
    Next step is to get these files into Access.  To do this, go into the share folder in the C drive and open the files you've just created.  Some text program to do this, but don't check the "always open this type of file with this application" box, in case you like some other format better. At this point, you may also want to do a find and replace in your word program to get rid of messy characters which III uses for diacritics.  Cleaning this up once the information is in Access is much slower.
    You will have a very very long file. A very important trick here is to go to the end of the first line and hit return after "LOCATION", i.e.,
title%author%OCLC #%CALL #%LOCATION

"Contemporary fiction in America and England, 1950 . . .
 This way, Access will be able to read the document.  God knows why this works, but it does. Do this to all your exported files.

      1 Now, open your Access database.
      2 Under the file menu, choose Get External Data, Import . . .
      3 Be sure that Files of Type has Text Files selected, or your files won't show up.
      4 Navigate to find your files.
      5 Select the first file, and click the Import button.
      6 Check the box for Delimited (click next)
      7 Check box for Other and type in "$" (click next)
      8 Check box for In New Table, type in a name now (click next)
      9 Name all 5 fields (click next)
    10 Check box for  No Primary Key (click next)
    11 Give your new table a name (click Finish).
    You will probably get an error message, this is actually okay.  Check the Import Error file to be sure you didn't lose anything too important.  Close the tables.
    To add your other files, repeat steps 2 through 7.  At step 8, check the box for Existing table, and select your table.  This will skip you to step 11 (click Finish).

Making User Friendly Backups
    Currently there are ten queries written in the catback database.  Every time the catback file is rerun, these queries will need to be modified so that they point at the new table with the new catback data.  For the time being, publish out word documents for each of these ten queries (sort them alphabetically, first.). Save them as HTML for easier viewing.  These files, plus the Access database itself, will now need to be burned to a CD for back up should the system go down.

Considerations:
    Having this back up will allow us to tell our patrons what items we own, should the system go down temporarily.  It is not, however, a true "back up" of our system.


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Page last updated: Monday, October 21, 2002