Home Forums Discussions Problems Help! Gigantic Back-ups!

Some Background:

We have a main computer that holds the AC database (not a separate server) with about 500GB hard drive.

We have an external Buffalo NAS drive (mirror RAID drive), also 500GB.

We have a 1TB external USB drive that we also back-up to occasionally.

I have an automatic back-up software called Memeo that makes regular back-ups of this main computer with the AC folder (along with other data in my documents, etc.) to the Buffalo NAS drive.

I have AC auto back-up to the local BACKUP folder (which gets picked up by Memeo) and also back up to the AC off-site servers (back-up to the NAS external drive gets taken care of by Memeo). We include imported items in all of our back-ups.

We import items using PaperPort and/or the internal scanning option within AC imported items. We scan mostly everything as black & white at 200dpi.

The Problem:

Each AC .enc back-up file is about 5GB. This has the effect of completely FILLING up both the hard-drive on our main computer and the Buffalo NAS drive. I am having to constantly clean out old back-ups to make room.

Do other practices also back-up with imported items and also have this problem? I see recommendations for 250GB hard-drives, and we can barely keep a 500GB hard drive with enough space!

Any suggestions? I thought scanning B&W at 200dpi would be low enough resolution to not create an issue with space.

Please help!

I take it you have your imported items in your .enc file. How do you back this up over the Internet to AC? It would likely take a long time.

First, while it makes good sense to back up to your local computer and then back that up, it seems to be causing issues, so I would stop and just back it up either directly to the NAS or the 1TB backup. I know 5GB would grow, but right now you could back up 200 backups to the Terabyte drive.

I would also back up the imported items separately. They could be backed up to the NAS or TB drive.

I don't see where manually going in and deleting backups is an issue. Probably 75% of the backup world do this.

All of my backups are set to have the last backup deleted in a certain time frame.

You could use Jungle Disk to back up offline for just the data.

Since Memeo backs up in different places, have it back to the NAS and the TB. If you back up the Imported Items to those two places plus Jungle Disk, and back up the small .enc file to the computer and then to NAS plus offsite, you will be offsite.

Remember, the imported items are helpful to have three months worth. The AC data is good for about five weeks. You can't go back and grab a file from AC .enc very easily.

Memeo is good backup software. It has the ability to do Continuous Data Protection as well. I looked at the site briefly to see if it could auto-delete, but couldn't find that listed. I would call and ask. It's rather robust.

If not, and it is important to you, then think about different backup software such as Acronis or Paragon.

I had an issue of filling up my entire backup drive as well. Upon checking on my main computer (containing the AC database), it was the Backup folder that had grown to over 300 GB, not the Imported Items folder.

I used Amazing Utilities (under Advanced Options "Cleanup & delete outdated backups") to delete many of the Backup files. This reduced my AC backup to just under 60 GB.

You have to keep deleting old Backups in the AC folder. Even if you have Amazing Backup backing up to another hard drive, it seems to put a copy in the Backup file on your main computer.

One of the silliest things about AC is the auto backup to its own folder.

My enc files are now 960 MB after a year of using AC and almost 700 patients. Does that sound like a reasonable size? I have the Fujitsu Snap Scanner set at auto resolution.

I think this is reasonable. I have 2200 patients in AC, and my backup is almost 4 GB including imported items.

With SQL Server, that is very reasonable. Of course, that doesn't include imported items as John mentioned.

The staff was doing scanning to finish paper charts in the Chicago office over the holidays while I was on vacation.

The size of the backup went 1.8G to 3G to 5G to 7G in a matter of 4 days.

Upon checking further the scanner in the back was doing 300x300 grayscale rather than black and white and the size of the scans was HUGE.

We went back and rescanned. I personally went into the import items and replaced the huge scans with small scans (B&W at 300x300) and the size went down to 2G.

It filled up the the backup computer and it would not take anymore, I had to delete most of them. The .enc with imports was too large and I had to start backing up without imports (80K)

Not only that, but B&W looks much more readable than grayscale.

Lesson learned. We lost a week and I had to put probably about 10 hours into importing the imports. I did not trust anyone else with that task.

Oh, this is on about 2700 patients.

Wendell,

If my Facebook patient moves to Chicago, should I recommend her to your practice to get you to 2701?

And, I know the feeling of doing it myself.

Somehow I think she might not be happy (or welcome) in my practice. But then again, who knows.

I had to stop the AC auto back up also as it was constantly eating up my drive and then the system would not back up at all. I was deleting old back ups all the time...just did not seem worth it. I too wish AC would back up where you tell it...who really needs a copy of their data on the same drive where it already exists?

I'm using Carbonite for my automatic offsite backup. Of course, each time AC backs up it has a roughly 1 GB file that is 'new' on the system and Carbonite starts sending it to their server. I had 35 dollars in data overage last month. Not too bad, but I'm paying 400 dollars a month for the phone lines, yellow pages ad, and internet. How about you?

Right now I am still using Mozy Pro but I have looked at Jungle Disk and like it so I think I will change. I gave up the Yellow Pages ads 15 years ago. Internet bundle includes basic cable TV at $121/month. Phone bill averages around $280/month.

That is one of the key differences in backup solutions that go off-site, can they recognize and do diff's (differential) backups as opposed to re-copying entire files.

This is really useful for keeping backups of whole directories, while only updating on the off-site backup the files that have changed. (say accounting, generated correspondence, training files, templates, images)

In the case of AC backups, unless you are running a script to replace-rename the most recent backup, you will get full file writes each night.

Wow, interesting to see people's patient numbers, scan information and back-up file size...

Our back-ups are now about 8GB, and we only have 769 active patients (1071 total). We scan at 200x200 dpi B&W. Maybe we just keep really FAT charts??

Also, I don't feel comfortable excluding imported items from AC off-site back-up because as rare as it is, I can't imagine having a fire and loosing all that data!

Believe it or not, I can't get the doctor comfortable with going paperless. She even prints the encounter notes and puts them in the chart!! ::smacks forehead::

Anyway, that's all for now.

- Sam

I use Jungle disk and it works well. Jungle disk gives you a choice between Amazon and Rackspace. Note that Rackspace doesn't charge transfer fees, while Amazon does.

I am also looking at Crashplan
www.crashplan.com
as another backup option. After mozy yanked their unlimited plan, a lot of people seem to be switching to crashplan. What intrigues me about crashplan is that it allows backup to a local external drive, to the cloud, AND to a remote drive at a friends house. All backups are encrypted.

Sam,

Just misfile a few charts and she'll see the light.

IF I go with Crashplan do I need any other backup software,such as BackupAssit?

You need to have someone go into the folders and delete old backups. My assistant does it once a week. She only keeps one week of backups in our folders at anygiven time. We also use carbonite.

Just wanted to point out that it is easy to configure a program to automatically delete old backups. We use Cyber-D autodelete, which does it very nicely so we never get overloaded with old back-ups.
And Wendell would like the price (as if we all don't).