Health Focus

Did you know that:

• A hard drive crashes every 15 seconds
• 2,000 laptop computers are stolen daily
• 32 percent of data loss is caused by human error
• One out of five computers suffer a fatal hard drive crash

Protect Yourself.  One Backup is not enough...

• Fact: Today’s hard drives store 500 times more data than the drives of a decade ago
• Fact: Systems today are storing more information electronically than ever.
• Fact: Every day we become more dependent on our computer data.
• Fact: It is almost certain that at some time you will encounter one of the following situations:

• Hard drive failure
• Power failure
• Systems software failure
• Accidental or malicious use of deletion or modification commands
• Destructive viruses
• Natural disasters (fire, flood etc)
• Theft or sabotage

• Fact: The loss of critical data can have enormous financial, legal and productivity ramifications on your businesses.
• Fact: The number of practices that don’t adequately protect their Complete data files is far too high.
  

An unplanned and prolonged outage can have disastrous results. Studies report that during a system failure 90 percent of companies experience lost productivity, employee and management dissatisfaction, and perhaps most damaging, customer dissatisfaction.

A major problem is that backup tools and techniques are not 100% reliable. While most of our clinics perform some sort of regular data backup, we frequently discover when a true emergency arises that the techniques used are less than adequate. Most clinics assume that hardware and storage media are in working order; that the data is not corrupted, and that your backup contains the data you need to provide a full recovery. In reality, hardware and software do fail and backups don’t always contain the correct data.

Many of you have been with us for 10 years or more. Even if you only use the basic features of the system, that’s a lot of data. What would happen to your practice if you lost it all. We have seen reports that show it takes 19 days and cost in excess R20,000 to re-enter just 20 megabytes worth of data.

How do you know you are protected?

Most business owners would be appalled if they knew the risk they are taking by failing to properly backup their data. It is more important than ever to protect the data your business depends on with a solid backup strategy.

Can you answer yes to each of the following situations?:

1. We backup our files often and regularly. How often should you backup your data files?   A general rule is to  backup your data files whenever you have done enough work that you would not want to repeat it if your data was lost. For a busy clinic with more than one terminal, the answer is daily. A small practice with a single computer
   might get by with 2-3 times a week.
2. We use multiple sets of backup media. In other words, you don’t overwrite the same set of disks/tapes each night or each week. Why not? Suppose that you have only one set of backup media and keep reusing it. Now suppose that your backup process fails for some reason. You are completely vulnerable, since you have no
   backup at all. More importantly, by using only a single tape/diskette/CD, you are not archiving a history of your data. Corrupt data often exists long before it rears its ugly head in a system crash. By using a single backup, you could be backing up corrupt data and have no chance of finding clean data to restore. Having multiple copies on a
   single media is not acceptable either. In order to protect yourself, you must have multiple copies in multiple places to be assured of retrieving your data in the event of a disaster.
3. We take some backups off site and keep them for a long time. Backup media is very cheap and compact. CD-R’s are now selling for about R4 each, and they are small when stacked together. You can store 70GB (100 CDs) in a stack about the size of brick. The same information on TR5 tapes is even smaller, although they cost more per gigabyte.
4. We test the backups to make sure we can restore our data! This is one of the biggest errors I see. Many practitioners feel secure in the belief that their staff is performing regular backups, only to be shocked when they actually try to use one of the backups and find that it does not work. There are many reasons that a backup may not have the files you think it does, including failure of the backup software, human error, and bad physical media. More and more practitioners are keeping a complete copy of their clinic system on their home computer and transferring their data to the backup system at least once a week. We strongly encourage this practice. It ensures that you have an up-to-date offsite backup, verifies that your backup and restore procedures are working, and provides you with easily accessible information the you can refer to when handling an emergency call or to analyze at your convenience.

What Should You Do?

There are a wide variety of data backup methods and none of them are perfect. You can compensate for this by backing up your data often and have lots of copies of your backups. You should be able to go back to last week or last month with a reasonable assurance that you will be able to read your backups. Many times the damage caused by a virus or internal file corruption may not show up for days. If you have a single backup that you overwrite every day, by the time you discover you have a problem, it will be too late. Your good data will be gone and your backup will only contain a copy of the problem files. I cannot tell you the number of times we get a request to recover the data for a client that was deleted by mistake only to find that the backups that might contain the data have long been overwritten.

One sure way to prevent this from happening is to setup and operate the following backup rotation schedule. If you are on a 6 day backup schedule this method requires 13 sets of backup media. This may seem like a lot, but it will protect your data and allow you to recover any data for a period of 4 months. To implement this method you will need 5 sets of daily backups labeled day1 through day5, 5 sets of weekly backups labeled Week1 through Week5, and 3 sets of monthly backups labeled Month1 through Month3. You would then backup your files according to the following schedule.

On the last day of each month backup your files using 1 of your 3 monthly backup sets.

Additional tips

• On the label write the date the backup set was placed into service so you know when to replace it.
• Find out how many backups you can safely expect to obtain from your selected media type and schedule regular replacements.
• Buy a cheap calendar and record the backup set used on each date.
• Cycle your weekly backups offsite. Even better, use your weekly backups to restore to your home computer.

What to do about errors?

The error message given may tell you the proper corrective action. Generally speaking the most likely errors occur because the files are being used by another terminal or because of problems with the backup media. If you get a backup error, first shut down all the computers and restart only the computers needed to do a backup e.g. server or server and a single workstation. Secondly replace the backup set with new media. If these actions don’t correct your problem, call us and we will see what we can do to help.

What backup media should I use?

These are the most common with their advantages and disadvantages.

You may have noticed on common thread in all of these backup methods. No matter which method you use, if you regularly (at least once a week) restore your files to your home computer and save the backup that you restored from for at least 4 weeks or more, then you should be able to sleep well knowing that your data is protected.