I’d like to be the first to bring this up since I just lost 2 deals today over it. It was 2 friends that both owned restaurants and they just got out of their Toast contract. They hated it and completely loved everything about Samba… until the end.
They said what happens if one of my printers gets unplugged when im busy or if it runs out of paper and I dont have time to replace it right away? I had no proper answer for them as we don’t have anything set up to handle that situation.
PLEASE solve this. A simple windows sdk should be able to give you print job status. We can add print job setting field “backup printer” and “backup printer template”. Its very important that if any duplicate receipts say “DUPLICATE BACKUP COPY” so the cooks know to lookout for the original duplicate receipt when it does come out.
Most systems I have seen have it including toast and clover.
Not possible with those solutions but thanks anyways. Also introduces some serious extra points of failure as now all print jobs are going through those 3rd party print servers.
It’s a simple windows integration to check print status that we need.
Yeah. I’ve had multiple clients tell me their previous system prints to backup and says “”BACKUP RECEIPT” up top so cooks know there will eventually be a duplicate when printer comes online again etc. They know to be aware that a duplicate may exist.
Very very important. Don’t want to have them make 7 plates twice.
From my experience an unplugged printer or paper out will print after back working. Jobs are quad in windows and print once printer available again 9/10 unless windows print spoiler playes up which would effect any printer.
Yeah the printers have built in memory that stores print jobs before they’re printed but these are all okay things for slow times. Where they have time to change paper, check cables, etc
If it’s busy they don’t have time to troubleshoot, food is going out late and customers are walking out.
Regardless though this is a fairly simple windows sdk implementation where we just run a quick check to make sure print job status is okay after it’s sent.
@Posflow that’s interesting.
I set to let windows spool which stops lost jobs if error but obviously doesn’t fall over.
What did you do to make it fall over to another printer?
Backing up to receipt printer for that terminal would be awesome, ensuring ticket isnt lost and letting FOH know the kitchen printer has issue.
Quick bit of googling sugests printer pooling and clustering.
Clustering requires server OS but pooling doesnt, however pooling just divids jobs evenly roundrobin style rather than failover.
How do you achieve?
This would be great! I had an old system with Matre’D installed and they had that option. It had a kitchen printer and if there was an error or it was offline it would print at the registers or where ever you set as the backup.
A little late but you can do back up printer/fail over with Spool Queue Viewer++ and it will auto redirect any print job to the other printer and you can have two printers backup pointing to each other for fail safe so if ones down the other prints it. see example video: How to Setup a redundancy /backup / fail over printer - YouTube