We recently sent you an email regarding the dangers of continuing to use ACCPAC Plus
for DOS accounting software on old hardware and old versions of Windows
in the age of Ransomware. Last week, we were called by an ACCPAC Plus
user who was hit with the 'Amnesia' variant of Ransomware. Fortunately,
their ACCPAC Plus data files did not have a .DAT extension (the ACCPAC
Plus default), but many of their ACCPAC Plus program files were
irretrievably lost. Like many ACCPAC Plus users, they were only backing
up their data, not the program files.
You MUST back up everything ACCPAC Plus-related on your system, not
just the data folder. Most Plus users only have their original ACCPAC
Plus installers on floppy disks. Even if you still have a floppy disk
drive somewhere you can run these from, the likelihood is that they
will have bad sectors and be unreadable. The flimsy magentic media has
a shelf date that has past.
Sage Software stopped development on ACCPAC Plus for DOS almost twenty
years ago and discontinued ACCPAC Plus for DOS eleven years ago. They
have not supplied replacement media for many, many years.
If the computer or network server you are running ACCPAC Plus on
crashes or is infected with Ransomware and you do not have backups of
everything -- data and programs, you may lose the ability to access
ACCPAC Plus.IMAGINE the
damage to your business if, one day, you could never access ACCPAC Plus
again! How ill you know who owes you money, what you'vre pad, what your
customers have bought from you? We hate to be alarmist but we have seen
this happen too many times.
Everyone this happens to was certain it couldn't happen to them. YOUR BUSINESS IS AT RISK!
Please be sure:
That your ACCPAC Plus data extension is not .DAT
That you are certain that you have everything related to ACCPAC Plus that you would need to recover from a disaster backed up.
That you have regular offsite backups including data at least once a week
That all patches and Windows Updates are installed.
We cannot recommend more strongly that if you are using ACCPAC Plus for
DOS, you should move to a supported, windows-based accounting system. Adagio accounting
will easily convert your ACCPAC Plus data and be familiar and easy to
learn for ACCPAC Plus users. If you are attacked by Ransomware and lose
access to ACCPAC Plus, you will have to upgrade/migrate on an emergency
basis (probably at the worst possible time) and not be able to budget
in advance for the software, hardware and implementation costs. Adagio
has many, many improvements and new features over ACCPAC Plus. Rolling
out in September will be an integrated Adagio Document Management
system (Adagio DocStore). We will be happy to show you Adagio with no obligation and at no charge.
If you would like our help being sure everything you need to restore ACCPAC Plus is backed up, please contact us at: http://www.mmanyc.com/contact.htm
We can also set up an offsite, cloud-based backup including a periodic
data integrity check on a subscription model. Keep in mind that an
ACCPAC Plus database cannot be properly backed up by most cloud file
archiving back up systems.
If you are no longer using ACCPAC
Plus, please reply to this email and let us know what accounting
software you are now using. We will remove your email from our future
emails of interest to ACCPAC Plus users.
