Why You Need to Backup Your PLC Programs

Be sure to visit our knowledge Center – http://www.innovativeidm.com/Resources.aspx

Hi, I’m Lonnie Muse with Innovative IDM. I would like to talk to you a little bit about why you should back up your PLC, but first I’d like to show you something. Something that’s really horrifying. Something that will just kill your day at the plant. This is what we need to look at. This is something nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that PLC light going off. Here’s the culprit: a little bitty $40 battery. You know what the result was? The programs got lost when they turned the power off, turned the machine back on. Guess what? No production. Can you imagine this: you’ve got a production line down because of a battery. And no backup when the tech tells you “there’s no backup. I don’t have the programs. We don’t know where they’re at. We can’t find them.” How long do you think that’ll be down?

Now the first big issue is being prepared for that. This is a $40 resolution. Make sure to keep the PLC on so you don’t lose it when you change this. The next thing is to backup your programs in the PLC. There’s a couple of ways to do that. One is a little SanDisk that will fit in a PLC normally. The other is something like a CD, your server, or a laptop. If you have the backup along with the software to put it in and out of your machine, then the battery’s not such a big deal because you can recover. But if you don’t have this, recovery is a lot of money and a lot of time because now you’ve got to recreate everything from scratch. And that’s thousands, maybe 10 thousands of dollars.

So you get a choice here, $40 or $10,000, a few minutes and a few cents or 10 pounds. You pick. We can help with that backup issue! Give us a call at Innovative IDM or go on our website at innovativeidm.com click on the field service and request some help. Come out and do that. Give me a call, I’d be glad to help. After all, we’re the home of the legendary customer experience.