Back-up files

There are many ways you can lose your work on a computer including: power outages; hardware failure; human error; and software errors. To guard against this PerfectTablePlan can create back-ups of your plan files. This saves you from continually saving to a new name file, e.g. plan1.tp, plan2.tp etc.

Depending on the choices in the Preferences window the software will create automatic back-ups of the software:

• every time you File| Save the plan

• every time you do an auto-layout

• every n minutes (assuming the plan has been changed in that n minutes)

Note Plans with more than 30 guests will only be backed up if you have purchased a licence key.

From PerfectTablePlan 1.2.15 backup files are created in a 'backup' folder in your plans folder. Prior to this they were created in the plans folder.

These back-ups are created with the extension .tpb (Table Plan Backup) and include a time and date stamp. For example, if you save myplan.tp at 17:42:05 on 11th February 2005 it will create a backup file myplan_2005-02-11T17-42-05.tpb . If some problem occurs with myplan.tp (or you just want to compare it with the older version) you can open myplan_2005-02-11T17-42-05.tpb and File|Save as it as a new .tp file.

To open a back-up file:

• select File| Open or the equivalent Main tool bar button, the Open window will appear

• select

	Table planner backup (*.tpb) in the Files of type drop-down
	Table planner backup in the Enable drop-down

• navigate to the folder containing the backup files, usually:

	c:\program files\PerfectTablePlan\plans\backups
	~\Documents\tableplans\backups

•   select the back-up file you want and click the Open button

Note Any number of back-up files on your harddisk will be useless if your harddisk dies. Make sure you back up to separate storage devices.

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