Within an office there are two major areas of threat to the Trustee's data: physical and employee maliciousness or dishonesty. The combination of Progress Software, TAS/13 and third party software provides solutions for each of these areas.

The causes of physical damage to the data are numerous and the most likely are the obvious ones: hardware, electrical, environmental and operating system failures, and employee malice. This is why backups are done daily, tested and stored offsite. The cost of restoring data without a backup, if even possible, would be staggering.

TAS/13 offers effective solutions to protect data beyond frequent backups. It is inevitable that a system will go down, usually at the worst moment. There is always the question of how much data was corrupted? How much time will it take to restore lost data? Even with timely backups, failures happen in the middle of the workday, between backups.

TAS/13 has the ability to create "before images" that store unmodified copies of all records being actively updated. In case of a power failure or a system crash, because TAS/13 has automatically backed up the data, when the system is restarted it automatically restores the incomplete transactions so that no inaccurate records are left in the database.

To ensure against losing data from disk drive failures, TAS/13 has roll-forward recovery capability. A log file on a separate disk is used to maintain an "after image" of all transactions completed since the most recent database backup. When a hard disk fails, it is only a matter of restoring the backup and running a roll-forward utility on this log file to restore the data to the last completed transaction.