Dr. Lorne Lavine Dental Technology Consultants Printer Friendly Version

Don’t Back Up Your Data!

I know, I know…..has Dr. Lavine lost his mind? Hasn’t he been preaching data backup as loud as he possibly could for year after year? Doesn’t he spend at least 30 minutes in his all-day lectures discussing backup strategy?

Well, don’t worry…I haven’t lost my marbles (yet!). I’ve just developed a complete paradigm shift in how I approach data backup and protection. Let’s look at a typical scenario. An office has a dedicated server and perhaps 8-10 computers throughout. The office backs up nightly to an external hard drive or tape and that device is removed from the office every evening and taken offsite. So, if anything ever happens to the office server, you’re protected, right? As I’ve found out over the past few years, the answer is usually no. The problem isn’t that your data is offsite and protected. The problem is how long it takes to recover from a disaster. If someone accidentally deletes a file or your practice management data becomes corrupted, that’s easy…just restore the missing or corrupted file from your backup. You’re still able to run the practice with no downtime. But, what if something happens to your server or main computer to make it non-operational? Motherboards can get destroyed by power surges. Servers can be stolen or ruined by fire or flood. If you don’t have a server that is running, what do you do with the backup? That’s the real problem that had me worried for a long time…how long would it take for a support technician to get an office back up and running if the server was gone?

Unfortunately, I found out the hard way with a few of our clients that the answer is: too long. The fastest we were able to get an office up and running was 24 hours and that was because they were able to go out and purchase a brand new server locally. The other offices averaged 48-72 hours, and a few were longer than that. That’s the real problem that has been overlooked by many dental offices when it comes to their backup system: not if the data is protected, but how much downtime will the practice suffer if something goes wrong. Consider that if your server is down, you are completely down.

 What if there was a way to be back up and running within 30-60 minutes even if your server was destroyed? What if you could combine this system with automatic backup to an offsite location that required no input from you or your staff? Wouldn’t a system like this be valuable for any dental practice?

Systems like this have been available for a few years for large corporations as they really couldn’t recover from a disaster without it. The concept is called “business continuity” and that seems to be a proper description: being able to continue to run your business even in the face of a disaster to your technology systems. The main deterrent for a dental practice to incorporate something like this was cost, but the costs have now dropped enough to make it a very viable option for dental offices. For most practices, they are looking at a startup cost of around $1500 and then a monthly fee to back up the data of around $50-100.

We’ve been installing these types of systems for a few months now and have been very pleased with the results. The system has two components: a device that sits in the office with a copy of the data, and online backup to secure servers that are spread around the country. The unique aspect of the in-office device is its ability to provide “virtualization”: if your server goes down, you can tell the device to act as a virtual server. As far as your computers are concerned, the real server is still up and running. Even if the entire office burned down, within a short period of time, you could access your data from a home computer or laptop and function normally. This is the concept behind business continuity, that no matter what happens, the office will be able to function normally with little to no downtime.

In a down economy, every practice worries about their spending, and that’s no different when it comes to technology purchases like backup and business continuity. The question to ask, though, is what would it cost to the practice to NOT have business continuity, and what is it worth to be able to sleep well at night knowing your office will recover from a disaster?

Feel free to contact my company, Dental Technology Consultants, to get more info about the business continuity systems we now recommend.

Lorne Lavine, DMD is the Founder and President of Dental Technology Consultants. Dr. Lavine holds two prestigious certifications, the A+ Certified Technician designation and the Network+ Certified Professional. These designations demonstrate proficiency in computer repair, operating systems, network design and installation. Dental Technology Consultants provides dentists a full range of services relating to the implementation of technology.

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Dr. Lavine can be reached at drlavine@thedentistsnetwork.net.

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