Auto Numbering Backups

[medic Mike]

I have a radio Amateur's program for logging I am working on. I can get it to create the backup with date and time to keep them unique, But cant find any example of consecutively numbering the backups.

I would like the output to be ……… "County Hunter - K8EMS - Bak1.accdb
County Hunter - K8EMS - Bak2.accdb and on and on

can someone point me to an example.

[Arjay]

If you want sequentially numbered backups (i.e. 1, 2, etc.), then you'll need to store the last number so you can increment it on the next back up. You can store this in a app.config (or appsetting.json if using .net core) file or in the registry.

Another approach is to date stamp the file.

Not a vb.net expert but in C#, it would be something like:

var backupFileName = $"County Hunter - K8EMS - Bak{DateTime.UtcNow.GetString("yyyyMMdd")}.accdb";

This would produce:

County Hunter - K8EMS - Bak20200115.accdb

Note: this uses string interpolation and I used UTC time. Call DateTime.Now for local time.

[2kaud]

But cant find any example of consecutively numbering the backups.

I can't give an example as I'm C++, but one way to find the next number to use is to iterate the folder in which the files are stored, find the file name with the highest number and then create the new file name with this number + 1. Note that depending upon how many files there are in the folder, this may have a performance impact due to the time to iterate the folder. However it does mean that you don't have to store the last number used somewhere etc.

[Arjay]

I can't give an example as I'm C++, but one way to find the next number to use is to iterate the folder in which the files are stored, find the file name with the highest number and then create the new file name with this number + 1. Note that depending upon how many files there are in the folder, this may have a performance impact due to the time to iterate the folder. However it does mean that you don't have to store the last number used somewhere etc.

It takes less time to interate a folder than one might think, but this approach assumes the user doesn't move the files from the backup location.