MLS Backup file size growing

[jaldarith]

I was directed here by a thread I just recently made, and I wanted to add something to it:

While I was driving to the bank with my 1st councelor, I was thinking about the internal purchases coming via messages with actual images, instead of being sent to us in paper form. I'm sure these images are also taking up a chunk of space.

[jeromer7]

... I was thinking about the internal purchases coming via messages with actual images, instead of being sent to us in paper form. I'm sure these images are also taking up a chunk of space.

I'm not at the Church computer, so can't readily verify this, but I seem to remember that IROPs don't have a "delete" (or is it "remove"?) option like the monthly finance reports do. So, if indeed the IROPs are included in each backup as finance reports are, then they'll continue to grow the backup file. The effect will depend on the number of IROPs a unit receives. At the stake level, I get the monthly stake phone bills in addition any distribution orders made. After printing the finance statement, I delete it as suggested previously in the Forums and thus remove them from the backup data set.

[jdlessley]

There was a 30 June MLS message stating:

MLS IROPs will be maintained in MLS for the financial records according to retention periods required by local law.

I gather from this that they cannot be deleted until expiration of the retention period.

[aprayzr]

Wow! Thanks guys! The stake clerk asked me today why the backup was taking so long. I checked and the backup file was 35Mb! I deleted the old financial reports and did a new backup. Now it is just over 6 MB!

As a side note, make sure your clerks are actually backing up to the flash drive. The backup has been defaulting to the hard drive and nobody noticed - the last backup on the flash drive was from 2008! The clerk has to pay attention to the file address and redirect to the flash drive, or at least copy it to the flash drive after it backs up to the hard drive, as suggested in this thread. Most of my clerks are not that computer literate, so this has been a problem across our stake. I just did not think it was a problem at the stake level.

[jpjones~ogr]

If I recall correctly, a previous comment indicated that saving direct to thumb drive has a side effect of taking even longer than to the hard drive.

I've switched to copying back-up files to thumb drives later. Windows' copy routine is much faster than MLS's backup routine.

[ffrsqpilot]

I called LUS several weeks ago about the IROP's on the stake computer. Like Bro. Brown mentioned we get lengthy telephone IROP's that not only take up space in the list of financial statements but take up time and space when backing up MLS. I asked if there was some way we could either print and then delete the telephone IROP's or at least get rid of them in the list of financial statements. They mentioned it was on their "radar" but probably won't be fixed in the next little while. Like everyone else our backups are getting into the 3 to 5 minute time ranges which is getting a bit silly in my mind. I'll try deleting old Unit Finance Reports and Consolidated reports in hopes that will bring the back up into a more sensible time frame.