When it comes to protecting your practice you carry insurance to protect the building and your practice. Now I want to protect all of your valuable patient information. I don’t want to scare anyone, but many offices are not recognizing that they have eliminated their charts, they have no film Xrays and no written ledger for their financial information. All of that extremely valuable data is hanging out on that big expensive computer we call the server. The average life span of a server hard drive is about 5 years. There is also nothing to stop the data from being fried by viruses, memory corruption, power failure, floods, fires and tornadoes.

If this scares you or concerns you it probably should. I have been there at the bad side of this situation countless times. When I have to call a doctor and ask him do you have a backup? There was a failure in the RAID array and bad data was written and corrupted your Dentrix folder making it unrecoverable.

The conversation went downhill from there. Because the data was corrupted and not an actual hard drive failure the options of data recovery were minimal. There was no backup. I went to Dentrix to rebuild the database but the file itself was pretty much non existent.

The path to recovery was sad and unhappy and I had a very upset client, but someone had him setup with an online data backup service that never fully backed up the file. (By The Way-Online Backup Services are a great way to save your data to back up just make sure you check it some time because it is important, but you need to make sure it is working)

So let’s give this a go. Backing up your data and being sure of it should not be a headache. These are the steps I would suggest.

1. Make sure your hard drive is mirrored in your server. Meaning that your hard drive is setup in a RAID 1 configuration where everything written to one hard drive is immediately written to a second hard drive. RAID 5 is also an option but a severe overkill in complexity and expense for a dental office. This is your first layer of protection and the best way to stop your practice from shutting down if one of your hard drives fails.

2. Pick a good and inexpensive online backup solution for your office. I would utilize this for backing up your practice management data, but it can become costly to back up digital x rays and intraoral imaging online because over a period of 5 years you could have up to 35Gb of data which also can be time-consuming to download after a failure. I am not saying it won’t work, I just don’t think it is the best solution.

3. Go out and buy 3 external hard drives large enough to backup the maximum capacity of your server hard drives so that no matter how full they get you don’t have to buy new drives. You could use Windows backup or several other good software backup programs. Schedule the backup to run at night and rotate the drives daily. This way you always have the previous days backup off site with you.

4. Check your backups. This is the last step but the most important one. I have been in many offices where they thought their technician had done everything properly and I get the backup in my hand and find out it hasn’t run in months or in one case it was simply not backing up the correct folder or the file was locked during the backups and never backed up. So the last step is the most important one for your office. Make it a rule that at least once a week you are going to check your backup and that it is just as important and making sure the water is turned off when you leave at night and the doors are locked.

Security is an important issue to everyone. May it be keeping the house safe or having a steering wheel lock on your car, we would do almost anything to ensure our belongings are safe. What about your own personal details? Now we are in the age where everything is starting to get digitalize. From our entertainment to our news, we would get them from the internet. We can even lodge complain or send a mail online. We also expose our personal details sometimes when we do our online activities. But have you notice that sometimes, our own personal details can be stolen by people?

We can be extra careful with how we deal with our personal information. Not saving any information on the pc, be wary of the links and website we go and not share any details with anyone we’re not familiar with. These in fact are the basic security steps but you cannot expect to stop your personal information to be guarded like that. People have been coming out with worms, Trojans and viruses set on stealing those information. They will somehow get through your cautious ways. There are a lot of software vulnerabilities that cannot be detected and patch up in time. And even non suspicious sites can get infected if their security is not enough.

That is why you need to get yourself a sort of spyware protection. If spyware are the foxes, then spyware removers are the hound dogs. They are familiar with where the worms might lurk and have the tools erase them. It is always to have one installed before you start installing any other programs or start surfing the net. Even though the spyware is supposed to detect and remove spywares, it is useless if the spyware have already stolen your information. Prevention is always better than the cure as they said.

If you are at your minds end on where to get these spyware removers, then fret not. There are a lot of spyware removers that are available free. You might think that the free version might not be able to be able to perform as well as the paid version. You are right and wrong on that. The free version will be able to perform as good as the paid version. The only differences is that the paid version will offer more than just scanning and removal, they would in fact also include customer support for those first time users.