Journaling your data will save you time later! If you're a Cumulus user and you've not already done so, you should really consider upgrading to version 7.5 - the current version. It includes one potentially life-saving feature called 'journaling'. This feature is common to many high-end database products, and protects your data against corruption.

Cumulus is, in essence, a specialised database which is fine-tuned to handle 'assets' - media files of all types. As with other database applications, Cumulus stores all of it's data in a large database file. Hundreds of thousands of assets on a file-server can be managed, referenced and previewed via a single 'Cumulus Catalog' database. Indeed these catalogs can grow to be several gigabytes in size.

The problem with such a file is that, if the server hosting the Cumulus Server application should crash for some reason, there's a chance that Cumulus might have been modifying the catalog file at the time - and as a result the catalog might become damaged and need to be repaired. Such repairs can take some time to complete if the catalog is large. This is where journaling comes in handy. Cumulus 7.5 lets you enable journaling on each of your catalog, and it records all changes made to a catalog before the changes are actually made. These changes are recorded into a separate file so a little extra disk space is required. Corrupted catalogs should now become a thing of the past, since Cumulus is able to refer to it's journal and rewind the catalog back to a point in time before the crash occurred.

It may be that you're support contract entitles you to run 7.5 and take advantage of this feature - plus many others introduced in the latest version. Give us a call to find out more.