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I am not a developer, nor do I work in IT.

I run the marketing department  at a small dealer group. I just like tech and know a bit of programming. For a bit we did have a marketing assistant who was also a IOS/Macos Dev & website programmer so we had even more custom solutions.

For being able to run software that can read the database with out using the DMS you can use a million different options. Back ups are just large docs that are usually just in SQL so you can use MS access to see them and use them.

As per the back ups. On DMS systems you can’t really pull a headless data pull via a third party software. In theory you can on PBS because it just connects to a SQL database. So you could just develop a simple app even in Python to just connect and duplicate data. (Might be something I look at doing)

For the most part you have to do a manual pull. So login enter the database password and then do a download. Because of that we can’t do a pull request every day. It’s too slow.

Usually I say once per quarter or once per month backups are pretty good. The idea is to minimize damage. So if let’s say CDK goes down you have a copy of the data base that’s only up to 3 months old max. We are not high volume dealers so this works fine. First service interval for us is not until 1 year after purchase. For anything more recent then that we can easily look back at paper dockets we have. But when you need to know about a customer who’s lease ended we can easily check the database back up.