Licence, updates and backups

The trial, the subscription key, updating in one press, and what is backed up.

How do I back up CoinOp, and what is in the backup?

CoinOp backs itself up nightly, and a backup can be taken and restored by hand at any time. It holds the whole venue — menu, staff, rates, trading history and settings — in one file. A backup from a newer version than the one you are running is refused rather than half-restored.

The trial

A fresh install works completely for seven days from the first time it starts. Nothing to enter, no card, nothing withheld — it is the whole product, so that the week tells you something true.

The licence

Settings → Licence

A check that fails changes nothing for 30 days. CoinOp carries on and says so on screen, more prominently as the month goes on. Your internet being down, or ours, is not your problem to solve in the middle of service.

What a check sends: the licence key, an install id, the venue name you chose and the version you are running. It carries nothing about your customers, your takings or your menu.

Updates

Installing is one press, and the machine does the rest:

1. Downloads the release and checks it against the published checksum.
2. Verifies the signature, so a tampered download is refused rather than installed.
3. Puts the new version in place and restarts.
4. Checks that it came back up — and if it did not, puts the old one back automatically. A venue mid-service does not have a maintenance window to debug in.

The screens reload themselves when it is done. Tills are browsers, so there is nothing to update on them.

Backups

On Linux the installer sets up a nightly backup of the database on the machine itself. It is the thing to point at whatever else you back up — a network drive, a USB disk, an off-site copy — because a backup that lives only on the machine it came from is not a backup.

Settings → Backup

A backup you can take yourself, without stopping anything or touching a file. Back up now writes the whole venue — takings, menu, staff, settings, the lot — and saves it wherever you point the browser, which on a counter machine means a memory stick.

It is a consistent copy taken while CoinOp is serving, not a file grabbed mid-write, so a backup made during Friday service is as sound as one made at four in the morning.

Putting one back

Restore takes a backup file and reads it before doing anything: it says which venue it is from, when it was taken and how much is in it, and refuses a file that is not a CoinOp backup rather than half-loading it.

CoinOp restarts into the restored venue. Nothing is merged — a restore is the venue as it was at that moment, not that venue added to this one.

Older backups are fine. Newer ones are refused.

A backup from an older CoinOp restores into a newer one and is brought up to date on the way in — that is the ordinary case, and it is what happens every time a machine is replaced with one that has since been updated.

The other direction does not work, so CoinOp will not do it. An older CoinOp has no way to undo a change it has never heard of, and the damage is quiet: a setting that has since been removed reads as switched off, and something like the kitchen printer stops without anybody being told why. Every backup records the version that wrote it, and one from the future is refused with the version on both sides and one instruction — update this machine first, then restore.

Moving to another machine

1. On the old machine: Settings → Backup → Back up now, onto a memory stick.
2. Install CoinOp on the new machine and sign in.
3. Settings → Backup → Restore, and point it at the file on the stick.
4. Point the tills at the new address — or give the new machine the old one’s fixed address, or its name, and change nothing at all.

The nightly backup above is still the one that runs without anybody remembering. This is the one for the day the machine is being replaced.