Losing your phone system programming due to a power problem or outage can be costly and disruptive to your business. All todays phone systems have batteries that will hold your phone system programming in the event of power loss. Usually these batteries work fine and will hold your program settings for days if not months when power is removed from the system.

Manufacturers traditionally have used Lithium or Nicad batteries that are soldered on the main circuit board or processor card. These batteries over time can go bad, and be costly to replace as it requires finding a technician who will take on the daunting task of removing and replacing these batteries.

The Partner ACS has taken on this problem by designing the system to use common AAA batteries. Looking at the controller card you can see at the bottom front of the module a place to install 2 AAA batteries. When these batteries get low, extension 10 will display “ChgBat W/PowerOn” or “ReplaceSysBat W/Power On” notifying you that the batteries need to be replaced.

When and if the time comes to replace these batteries do not remove power from the system, simply remove the battery clip holding the batteries in place and replace with new ones. If the batteries are installed correctly then the change battery warning will no longer appear on the display of extension 10.

Despite having batteries as a first line of defense against program loss, you still can lose your system programming for various reasons. The Partner ACS addresses this with the ability to backup your programming to PC Cards that you can insert into the controller card. There are two different PC Cards that allow you to do this.

The first is the Partner Backup and Restore Card (or green card). This card is specifically designed for backing up your programming. The other card is the Partner Remote Backup and Restore Card (silver card). The silver card allows you to backup system translations and gives you the ability to remotely access the Partner ACS using a modem to administer the system using special software.

Partner ACS R7 also introduced the ability to use internal memory on the processor card to be used for backup, which eliminates the need for the external PC Cards.

For owners of the Partner ACS R7 or either PC Card backup solutions, you should check to see if your system is properly programmed to take advantage of these options. By default Automatic System Backup is not turned on so there is a good chance this feature was not activated when installed.

All system programming must be done at extension 10 or 11 and have a display. Locate either one of these extensions. Press FEATURE 00 and press the left intercom button twice. The display will read SYSTEM PROGRAM. Dial #123 for Backup Programming Automatic. For the Partner ACS R7 press 1 for Internal memory or press 2 if you have a Backup and Restore PC Card installed. Lower revisions of Partner ACS require that you have a PC Card for backup installed in your controller and you need only press 1 to active automatic system backups.

To initiate a manual backup of your system to a PC Card or internal memory use program #124. On the Partner ACS R7 you can press 1 for the internal memory, or 2 for a PC Card. Press the ENTER button (check photo below for location of Enter button). The display will indicate that a backup is in progress and when finished will read that the backup was successful. It’s good practice to use this procedure before you make major changes to the configuration of your phone system, as it will allow you restore your system to its former state in the event you don’t like the changes you’ve made or you really bugger up the system to the point where things are not working correctly.

Now that you have you your system program nicely stored on your PC Card or Internal memory, let us go through the steps on restoring your system settings. Again, all system programming must be done at extension 10 or 11 and have a display. Press feature 00 and the press the left Intercom twice. Display will read “SYSTEM PROG”. Press #125 for Restore Programming.

Now Choose the backup file you want to restore:

• 1 Internal Man.mmddyy, where “mmddyy” represents the date of the manual backup to internal memory of the processor module
• 2 PC Card Man.mmddyy, where “mmddyy” represents the date of the manual backup on the PC Card
• 3 Internal AUTO.mmddyy, where “mmddyy” represents the date of the manual backup to internal memory of the processor module
• 4 PC Card AUTO.mmddyy, where “mmddyy” represents the date of the manual backup on the PC Card

Press Enter button to start the restore (see picture above for location of Enter button). If the system does not detect an error, the restore begins. A successful restore will cause all calls in progress to disconnect and the system resets itself. Keep this in mind before you decide to do a restore during business hours. The only feature that obviously isn’t backed up is system Time and Date, so will need to reset these after a restore. You can find instructions here: Time change on Partner ACS.

Hopefully this tutorial will have you ready for that unfortunate event of losing your phone system settings. The few seconds it takes to backup your system will save you the headache of reprogramming or the money to hire someone, if you can’t.