I thought I would draw some attention to Cumulative Update 8 for Dynamics NAV 2013R2 and a new feature added. The update includes a replacement for fbk files also known as the old Backup/Restore Functionality many have been missing.

First of all calling it a Backup/Restore functionality is a little much. It is not meant to be used to take backups or do restores. Backup and Restores should be done via SQL ONLY. A place where this would be great to use would be cases where you have a bug and you need to quickly grab the data to reproduce and/or debug at a later point.

Taking a copy of your data and or your objects don’t guarantee that you can restore them in a live environment is one thing and the other is that SQL is far better to ensure you never lose your entire database.

So how does it work?

In the menu in General under Departments => Administration => IT Administration you will find 2 new options “Import From Data File” and “Export To a Data File”.

Selecting the Export we get a page that hopefully feels very much like the options we use to have.

I am not going to explain the fields here as I am sure you all know them and if not check out the online help.

Once filled out just push OK and the common dialog pops up.

Notice the new extension “*.navdata”. This is a new file format, so no going back or using the old files.

The import looks pretty much the same and again no big surprises here.

So what is new? First of all 2 new Pages where added 9900 Import Data and 9901 Export Data, but also 2 new commands that you can find used in the these 2 Pages.

EXPORTDATA and IMPORTDATA. These command now gives you access to import and export navdata files via code.

While I was writing this I just noticed that a blog post was posted on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog this morning with a lot of great details on this including the fact that this can be executed via PowerShell of course. Please read “Importing and Exporting Data in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 CU 8” with all the details.