back up

drpeteryee · Post by **drpeteryee** » Mon Nov 18, 2013 4:55 am

I have 5 work station and a dedicated computer to act as a server. Also we use tigerview/scan x to take digital photos and clamx to send claims. If the dedicated computer crashes, what is the simplest way to get the data transferred to another computer while at the office. Should I buy a raid 1 computer or have another back up computer not in use and use that one if the dedicated computer crashes. Also should I pre-install open dental and tiger view on this back up computer? Finally, is switching out drives and taking it home still the best option?

bpcomp · Post by **bpcomp** » Mon Nov 18, 2013 9:42 am

There are many ways to backup and protect your data. The answer I always give to this question is how many ways can you afford? If you can manage more than 1 way to backup your data then you should. Typically raid 1 is not considered a backup but is more a reliability measure. When you say "switching out drives and taking it home", do you mean portable drives and you are manually backing up Open Dental and Tiger View or do you mean something else.

The Best option is what works best for you. Some people use an online service, or complicated backup software, or manually copy everything. What has been popular on the forums recently for the server is to virtualize it and make copies of the virtual machine. If you have a copy of the server virtual machine on your portable drive, then you can run that server virtual machine on any computer in the office (usually). What that means is that if your server has catastrophic hardware failure and both drives in your raid one go belly up, you can have your server running on another machine in the time it takes to copy the files and boot up.

In our office we have a computer that plays the movies and the virtual server gets copied to that machine every night. If our main server goes down then the movie playing machine will become the server in a matter of minutes just by booting up the virtual machine that was copied that night.

KevinRossen · Post by **KevinRossen** » Mon Nov 18, 2013 9:12 pm

I agree with the above that more than 1 backup strategy is essential!!! We had a server crash last year and lost about 4 months of data (we were running a different software at that time). We had a backup strategy in place . . . or so we thought. We didn't ever test out a restore/recovery of our data. Now, I'm extremely vigilant with my backups and have six layers of backups (you can call me paranoid) and they all have their own function.

No matter what backup method you use you HAVE to test the backup. And the only way to test it is to try out what happens if you have to start with the backed up data from scratch.

Here are my backup methods:
1) Daily image of server to dedicated external drive (mainly to recover the server, not just Open Dental data)
2) Daily backup of our data folder to portable USB (three drives that I rotate daily and take home, encrypted with BitLocker)
3) Daily backup of data folder to laptop that I take home (in an encrypted folder)
4) Daily backup of data folder as an encrypted zip file to another workstation at our office (automated)
5) Encrypted backup is stored in a DropBox folder, so it is automatically backed up to the cloud (automated and I can get previous versions of our data if/when needed)
6) Monthly backups stored on workstation for archive purposes (in case something goes awry with our back ups that we don't catch after a few days)

Overkill? Maybe, but it only takes me about 5-10 minutes of my time each day to make this system work. The part that takes the longest is testing the restore, but I only do that about 1-2 per week.

bpcomp · Post by **bpcomp** » Tue Nov 19, 2013 6:05 am

No matter how much backup you have, there is always the perfect storm that can over come all of your protective measures. The idea is to have so much protection that it would take a mighty big storm to overcome all of your protection. For KevinRossen I say good job sir. Keep it up!

KevinRossen · Post by **KevinRossen** » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:10 am

bpcomp wrote:No matter how much backup you have, there is always the perfect storm that can over come all of your protective measures. The idea is to have so much protection that it would take a mighty big storm to overcome all of your protection. For KevinRossen I say good job sir. Keep it up!

Thanks for the feedback. That's my goal. It would take the office getting destroyed/burglarized, my home destroyed/burglarized, and DropBox wiping my data all at the same time for my strategy to fail. I'm not saying that couldn't happen, but it's highly unlikely.

If anyone wants more details on how I set everything up I'd be happy to share. It took me a lot of time to tweak it, but it wouldn't take as much for someone to start if they wanted to copy my setup.

Tom Zaccaria · Post by **Tom Zaccaria** » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:44 am

Let me add this to whatever has been said here. A backup is not complete until it is properly restored and tested in another location. This way you know the backup is valid.
My day is not finished until I restore and boot up OD at home.

Last piece of the puzzle

drtmz

drpeteryee · Post by **drpeteryee** » Wed Nov 20, 2013 9:35 am

I am setting up a system from scratch- so I would like to back up tiger view and open dental. What would be the configuration of the computer that acts like the server and what else would I need to buy such as external hard drive, portable hard drive, etc. Essentially, if the computer crashes- I would like to be up and running quickly. As said before- we have five computers. Thanks

gthiele · Post by **gthiele** » Wed Nov 20, 2013 5:10 pm

Have you looked at this page? It is extremely helpful in getting your system backups going. http://www.opendental.com/manual/backups.html

babysilvertooth · Post by **babysilvertooth** » Mon Dec 09, 2013 9:12 am

I used to do many of these....then I contacted a company (well known) that set me up with a back up of my server and offsite back up. I don't have to rotate drives, take anything home, worry about taking encrypted data with me anywhere, etc. If something goes down, I have a fireproof onsite back up that can be up and running just like my server, and offsite that can be downloaded or sent ASAp....

Here are my backup methods:
1) Daily image of server to dedicated external drive (mainly to recover the server, not just Open Dental data)
2) Daily backup of our data folder to portable USB (three drives that I rotate daily and take home, encrypted with BitLocker)
3) Daily backup of data folder to laptop that I take home (in an encrypted folder)
4) Daily backup of data folder as an encrypted zip file to another workstation at our office (automated)
5) Encrypted backup is stored in a DropBox folder, so it is automatically backed up to the cloud (automated and I can get previous versions of our data if/when needed)
6) Monthly backups stored on workstation for archive purposes (in case something goes awry with our back ups that we don't catch after a few days)

KevinRossen · Post by **KevinRossen** » Mon Dec 09, 2013 9:39 am

babysilvertooth wrote:I used to do many of these....then I contacted a company (well known) that set me up with a back up of my server and offsite back up. I don't have to rotate drives, take anything home, worry about taking encrypted data with me anywhere, etc. If something goes down, I have a fireproof onsite back up that can be up and running just like my server, and offsite that can be downloaded or sent ASAp....

That's pretty nice. The only thing that I wonder about for online backups is recovering the images. Our total data size, including images in Kodak Dental Imaging, is ~130GB. That would take days to download that data. For that reason alone, I'm not planning on backing up images online.

drmaximus · Post by **drmaximus** » Thu Dec 12, 2013 5:52 am

Here is my backup scheme, I am looking for feedback:

0. Computer HDD is in RAID mirror
1. Crashplan backup of Database, images & xrays to their online servers and local external HDD
2. Mozy Pro backup of database, images & xrays to their online servers
3. ShadowProtect backup of entire disk drive image to external HDD
4. Monthly manual truecrypt container backup of data and storage onto google drive with image split with Win 7s and I take one of the file segments off the google drive and store it on a flash drive so no one can piece together the set without the flashdrive

Its served me well so far.

bpcomp · Post by **bpcomp** » Thu Dec 12, 2013 8:45 am

Do you run a domain in this setup or peer to peer? Also for step 4 I think it's unneeded to have one of the pieces on a flashdrive because the data is contained in a truecrypt container. Having a trucrypt container is more secure in my opinion that the Mozy and Crashplan backups, unless those are also in a truecrypt container.

drmaximus · Post by **drmaximus** » Thu Dec 12, 2013 9:41 am

bpcomp wrote:Do you run a domain in this setup or peer to peer? Also for step 4 I think it's unneeded to have one of the pieces on a flashdrive because the data is contained in a truecrypt container. Having a trucrypt container is more secure in my opinion that the Mozy and Crashplan backups, unless those are also in a truecrypt container.

I run a peer to peer. I don't use truecrypt in Mozy and Crashplan because they claim its encrypted from end to end during the transfer. I agree step 4 is un-needed on a flashdrive but it lets me sleep at night

bpcomp · Post by **bpcomp** » Thu Dec 12, 2013 12:25 pm

Fair enough on getting sleep. They are correct that the data is encrypted end to end for Mozy and Crashplan but I'm fairly sure that if an employee (of Mozy or Crashplan) wanted to get access to your files, then they could. With Truecrypt it's pretty much just the NSA who can get your data.

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