Everybody does Backups, right??
When we talk to clients we hear it all the time "sure we do backups, we've been doing backups for years."
But I'll tell you one thing backups are not what's important. Recovery that's what's important.
I cannot tell you the number of times I have come into a situation where backups have not been tested, and subsequently failed, or what has thought had been backed up was not.
In fact that's how we got into this business. I was called to a dental office that the front office staff had been replacing backup tapes every day of the week as instructed for almost two years, but no one had ever checked them.
They had a minor power failure (brownout) at an inopportune time when a number of different records were being written to the database and subsequently the database became corrupted.
When we attempted to restore data we discovered that there was no data on any of the tapes.
The software company for the practice management software stated that they would be unable to help without a proper backup and that the practice should start inputting patient data from the paper charts.
Well a lot has changed.
We no longer use tapes for backups, at least not in my business.
What we backup, how we back it up and how we recover has all changed dramatically.
It is paramount when you’re choosing a backup system to understand what it is that you’re backing up and how long it will take you to recover. As stated earlier, recovery is much more important than backups.
What you choose to back up will determine how quickly you can get back in business after an issue arises.
The likelihood of a disaster coming in the form of a hurricane or a tornado or fire is not as likely as having a hard drive error or a ransomware infection or human error where critical information gets deleted or becomes inaccessible.
Our weapon of choice is a product called ShadowProtect from a company called Storagecraft.
We have had great success with this product in many different scenarios including:
individual file recovery
total system recovery including operating system configurations and software loads
Total recovery of a system to dissimilar hardware
testing of different patches and software updates in a virtual environment
There are two key considerations when looking at any backup system.
Recovery Time objective and recovery point objective.
Recovery Time objective is basically how quickly you need to recover a critical system or application before it adversely affects the company or practice.
Recovery point objective is a point in time that is acceptable to recover with some data loss . . . or not.
The shorter the amount of time or points involved in the recovery scenario inversely increases the budget required to recover the data and meet these objectives.
In many businesses including the dental practice, more and more information is being moved from the paper realm to the digital realm.
Digital x-rays, digital charting and many other operations within a modern dental practice no longer have either a paper or film backup.
It is therefore evermore critical to have sophisticated systems in place to minimize data loss and to recover in a timely fashion to maintain normal procedures.
We welcome any questions that you may have regarding backup or data recovery for your business and look forward to you reaching out to our company.
As we move forward with this website it is our intention to create video-based training and procedures that we will make readily available to interested parties.
It will not be our intention to hold hostage or to require the registration with an email so that we may contact you.
It will be our policy that the information we provide is for the benefit of all clients current or potential and that access to that information will be not be limited to you providing us your contact information.
So please contact us if we can be of further assistance.