We are now in the heart of hurricane season and hopefully all of your hurricane readiness and disaster plans are in place. One thing to keep in mind is having your data recovery backup plan tested and verified for restoration in case it becomes necessary.It is highly recommended to have a virtualized server and a digital backup that is performed daily at the bit level, so all programs and settings are backed up, including your practice data. If for any reason a server has to be restored from a data-only backup, then the need for all program disks and passwords is essential. The gathering and semblance of software always seems to be a stressful point for many businesses and practices. As an example, a typical conversation might occur like this, “What did we do with the disks and license key for our QuickBooks program?” These types of questions are usually raised for many of your valuable and proprietary software. Performing a digital backup alleviates the need to locate disks and license keys.
Digital backups are available and usually performed by your IT support team. Every evening when your backup completes, a notification e-mail can be generated and automatically sent stating that the backup has successfully completed or has failed. This will give the practice the knowledge, status and integrity of their backup. In addition to running your daily backup on-site, consider the benefit of having an off-site copy available in the cloud or at a local data center. Another advantageous feature of this type of data recovery backup is the easy restoration of any accidentally deleted or lost file(s) within minutes of detection by a user.
To complete the daily backup process a reliable hardware device should be considered. This would include an external backup drive unit that is networkable and has multiple disks or RAID features, providing a level of redundancy even within the backup recovery storage device itself.
Relax and enjoy the rest of your summer knowing that your practice is ready for weather-related, hardware failure or any other type of potentially catastrophic event.
