Sage 100

I'm consulting to a very large customer on Sage 100 Advanced 2014 upgrading to 2019. They have 50+ company codes, many of which take up a ton of disk space. They manage this by using alternate directories, that is all their MAS_NNN folders are on a different location, specifically a NAS device. In Company Maintenance, in the Data Location field a UNC (SMB) path for the alternate directory is there. It's working but I've always wondered if there is a small performance price to pay.

This customer IT group also made a big point of "it's easier to backup the data this way" and I've cleared that confusion that a lot of important MAS system data is under \Mas90 and that it must be backed up as well. Also that the MAS system data cannot be moved out to the NAS that it has to stay under \Mas90.

Their legit concern now is if both company and system data are on the Sage server (not a NAS), there would be terabytes of data to backup from 1 source server. They are concerned about whether a single backup device can hold terabytes of data and the extended time / latency for backup doing it this way.

The question I'm being asked now for their v2019 upgrade is does Sage 100 support deduplication / dedupe ?

Meeting up with them today but I assume they mean to have multiple dedupe sources (several NAS' holding the MAS_NNN folders and Sage server itself) and several dedupe targets / data stores / backup devices. I've never been asked about dedupe before. Has anybody implemented this with Sage 100 before?

@Steve Iwanowski @George Khairallah ​​​@Raymond Westcott ​

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Alnoor Cassim

Accounting Systems, Inc. (ASI)
Email: alnoor@asifocus.com
Orange County, CA
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Sorry @Alnoor Cassim I don't have any knowledge on whether Sage supports dedupe backups.
However,  knowing how dedupe restores the end result of the restore, should theoretically result in a full data set (regardless of the backup method), which is what Sage should ultimately care about/support. (only my opinion)

​​

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George Khairallah
CTO | gotomyerp, LLC
george.k@gotomyerp.com | 877-888-5525
http://gotomyerp.com/
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For the actual storage of Sage 100 itself, I've never tried Windows built-in dedupe tools (since 2012?) but I can't imagine it would go well with transactional files. 

However, most of the backup tools that we've used over the past few years (Datto, StorageCraft, Altaro, Veeam, etc) all perform deduping on the backup target-side and we'll usually get an 8-10x compression with the MAS_* folders.  Combine that with some sort of Full + Incremental backup strategy, and they should be covered pretty well.

It sounds like they're in a tough situation since any recovery event would be an absolute time suck.  If I had my IT Architect hat on (and sufficient budget), I'd probably have some sort of time-delayed (~30 minutes) VM-server-level replication going on with frequent server-data-level snapshots. So that if the server completely blew up, you'd be up and running immediately with < 30 minutes data loss, however, that would require double the licenses and resources, especially storage.   

Not sure if I really helped you or not, but good luck, and let us know how it goes! :)

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Steve Iwanowski, NextStep Technology Advisors, aka DSD Lancaster PA ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Tell them to go to SQL!  Backups should be easier for them that are more normalized!

I cannot imagine they have 1tb of data.  Largest I have seen has been 200 gig for one company.  Are they making unnecessary backups of the live company?

Johnny Pabian
Pabian Partners

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Johnny Pabian
Owner
Pabian Partners
Dallas TX
2145502173
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