Saving backup of media attachments before adding to RE or NXT

Lisa Bergmann 2

Last year we converted from our legacy system to Raiser’s Edge (RE and NXT) and I have a couple of questions on how others handle the media files/attachments.  During the conversion we had all the attachments from our legacy system saved to an external hard drive and we uploaded them to the FTP for transfer to RE, and we still have them on the external device.  Since conversion though, any new attachments we have first been saving to our desktops, rather than the hard drive.  This is so we can then drag and save to the constituent record in NXT with the ability then to have more than one person saving attachments.  We then delete the attachment from our desktops, which means we do not have a backup of the file/attachment.  I am curious to know what other organizations do.  Do you continue to keep a folder of your media attachments on an internal network server/folder (or an external hard drive) as a backup, or only keep them in RE?  Also, does anyone know if there is a way to pull all media files from the database in order to save them to a backup location, or do you need to copy each file individually? 

 

Daniel R. Snyder

Hi Lisa, I would encourage you to save a backup of these files as currently if you needed to restore to a backup those files you are adding as attachments will not be restored. There is another thread about this here and for more details about what is included in a backup, here is a Knowledgebase article

Rachel Cavalier

Our supporter care team store our media files (largely PDFs for Gift Aid Declarations and some consent related correspondence) on an internal server in addition to uploading them into our database software (and we have the paper originals all files for the last 7 years or so at least as well). 


For media files for other teams, which would probably be mostly scans of signed thank you letters or donation-related paperwork - this is left to the discretion of those teams. If we were to lose them, it's less of a problem because we have paper copies of all of the donation paperwork and we would at least have the word docs/templates for those thank you letters if we needed to know what was in them.


I know when we moved over to RE NXT, we had SO many media files in our old database that we didn't actually transfer the majority of the actual files over because the process would have taken a very expensive amount of time. We went with the process that files related to Gift Aid declarations, and a few other categories would be uploaded but the rest would go into our own cloud storage and an attribute with a URL to that item would be added to the corresponding action.