Repair Rundown

Setting Easy GradePro 4 to Automatically Backup to Your Server

By Sheri Gimlin and Antonio Garcia 

While we recommend saving your gradebook to your local computer, Easy GradePro 4 makes it easy to backup your grades automatically to the server.  You can choose from a daily, weekly or monthly backup schedule.  Easy GradePro recommends you set it up daily.  If you choose daily, please remember that you will need to clean out the old files from your server file regularly.  Easy Grade Pro’s Backup options can be found by clicking on Edit à Grade book Options à General Tab à Backup Options. 

Here are directions from the Easy Grade Pro 4.0® User Manual:

When closing a gradebook... do not save a backup, prompt to save a backup or automatically save a backup. We recommend that you select the third option so that a backup is made every time you close it.

• Default backup Name... ‘Year-Month-Day.egp’, ‘Day of Month.egp’ and ‘Day of Week.egp’. With these options, you’d get gradebook names like 2006-11-06.egp, 6.egp and Monday.egp respectively. So which is best? The first option offers the greatest security but it will also result in the greatest number of backups by the end of the school year because you’ll end each day with a unique backup that will never get replaced by the backup made on another day. With the second option, the backup made on the sixth day of the month will get replaced by the backup made on the sixth day of the next month. And, with the third plan, the backup made on Wednesday of this week will get replaced by the one made next Wednesday. If you have the space on your hard drive, server or flash drive, we recommend the first option.
• Default backup Location... You can choose to have the backup saved automatically to a Gradebook Backups folder in your Documents folder, on your Desktop or to a location of your choice. For the greatest security, we recommend the third option if you can set the save location to a server or to a flash drive that you can store at another location when you aren’t using Easy Grade Pro.

Finally when working in Easy GradePro, please remember if you have a gradebook with a ‘Copy of copy of...’ in its name, it means you are opening and using your backup copies instead of your main gradebook. A backup copy of a gradebook is like an insurance policy -- it’s something that you hope you never have to use. Don’t get your gradebook and its backup copies confused, and don’t work on a backup of your gradebook unless there is a good reason.

Reference:
Orbis Software Inc.  (1992-2007). Easy Grade Pro 4.0® User Manual.  Retrieved November 27, 2007 from http://www.easygradepro.com/EGPManual4.pdf.