You’re all making back ups of all your data after every working day, right?

Well if you’re not you should be.

Yesterday, one Panara user’s server computer was dead when he arrived at the practice and he was subsequently unable to get it going again. Not knowing whether your hard drive, where all your data is stored, is kaput or not isn’t pleasant.

Especially on a Saturday when the chances of getting your hardware support guy to have a look at it are close to nil.

The next question that comes to mind in such a situation is how recent is the latest back-up.

Luckily in this case, that turned out to be Friday night, Mozy had done its job and backed everything up to the cloud and to a local external hard drive. With this local backup it was possible in a matter of minutes to get Panara working again with a different computer on the network acting as the data server.

A few points

1) You can have manual back-ups or you can automate the process. Unless you’re incredibly disclipined the latter approach is probably the best.

2) I’m not particularly recommending Mozy. There are other providers both foreign and domestic, it just so happened that it was Mozy this dentist was using.

3) A back-up is only of use if it’s possible to restore from it. And the only way to ascertain this, is to restore the data from your back-ups on a regular basis. If your back ups are being made both to an external hard drive and to the cloud then you should test both. It’s possible that restoring from the cloud might not be a satisfactory experience. I’ve experienced a situation where this has both taken forever and also had files missing.Obviously this restore should not be done on your practice’s network, you don’t want to overwrite your live data.You should have a PC or laptop with Panara installed on it, that is not connected to your network, and at least once weekly restore the latest back-up to this and confirm that the restore is successful.This computer can be included in your site licence so there are no licensing issues

4) Finally there is the issue of data protection. If you are storing the back ups on external hard drives, then the drive should be encrypted. If you are using an online service you should check to see that it complies with Irish and European law. Among the factors to be taken into consideration is the jurisdiction in which the data is stored.