As your business keeps going, you get more and more history information. While history is good, in that it can be used for such things as computing inventory reorder values, there comes a time when it starts to burden the system, also.
This particularly comes into play when it comes time to upgrade. Some upgrades only require updated programs, while others require updating or migrating your data. The more data you have, the longer the upgrade process takes.
Many times I have seen an upgrade, where the customer has years, and years of history, that has taken a day or longer to upgrade all the data.
It is better to evaluate your history, and what you need from it, and remove old data that is no longer of real value. This is highly variable, and may be a few months in one case, or several years in another.
However, there are not very many cases where data five, ten, or even more, years old is needed. Removing this old data will help your system on it’s day-to-day operations, as well as at upgrade time.
Less data means smaller files, which take less time to back up. Additionally, the larger a file is, the longer it takes the system to access a record, and especially to insert new records. So your end-of-day posting will benefit also.
Larger files are more susceptible to corruption, as well. They take up more space on the disk, so there is more chance of piece of the data being corrupted. Additionally, some packages do not handle large files well due to internal issues, and may corrupt a file even without there being any hardware issues.
For help optimizing your system for the best backup program and history retention plan contact us at CCS Retail Systems.