Using Offsite Backup

Important Update

As of April 2025 this part of Trash Flow is changing soon. All cloud users will be getting the ability to store specific backups (and reload them if needed) at no additional cost. The instructions on this page are left here for anyone with questions until the new backup options are in place.

Understanding Offsite Backup

Once Trash Flow’s technical support team has helped you set up offsite backup you should have a shortcut on your desktop called OSBU. Double-click the shortcut to open the offsite backup program. The program has four functions:

  • Backup: Click this button to send a backup of your current data.
  • Setup Automatic Backup: Click this button to set the options for automatically backing up your data. Check Use Auto Backup then check the box for every day on which you want a backup to be made and choose a Time for the backup to run. Do not change what’s entered in the Key field. Click OK to save the settings. Note that your computer must be powered on and the OSBU program must be running at the time the backup is scheduled to run.
  • List Backups on File: Click this button to show a list of previous backups made using OSBU. The software will keep the 10 most recent copies of your data.
  • Restore Selected Backup: List the backups on file, click the one you want to restore, then click this button to restore the backup. Note that restoring a backup will overwrite all your current data with the data from the backup; be sure that you need to restore a backup before doing so.

OSBU stores up to ten backups at a time; when you making an eleventh backup the oldest one still on file will be automatically deleted. The window on the right shows the date, time, and size of the backup files. You can also see your account number with us here at Trash Flow, whether any backups are currently scheduled, and which version of Trash Flow you are currently on.

Further information

Trash Flow tech support can help set up command-line arguments to OSBU to allow users to update different databases to their OSBU account. To add command-line arguments, create a short-cut to OSBU on the desktop, right-click on it, select "Properties" and add them in the "Target" field after the quotes.

  • -c<profile> - Causes OSBU to this this profile name from SelectDB
  • -e<letter> - OSBU will use the file extension .ob<letter> instead of the default .obu NOTE: You MUST use different letters for the 2 setups otherwise you can't tell the difference between the 2 backup sets.
  • -t<integer> - Run the nightly backup <integer> minutes into the day, so -t90 will run the backup at 1:30am. -t150 will run it at 2:30am, etc.