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I have a on site backup scheduled to run at 9:30 PM Everynight using the Amzaing Backup Utility.
Under the advance settings I have unchecked Exculude Imported Items and Exculde Images (i.e. I want to backup those two items)

Every nigth there is 4 files and 1 folder created in the backup directory of AC which are as follows
FileNames
PracticeName_XXXX_122911_020815.enc
PracticeName_XXXX_122911_093028.enc
PracticeName_XXXX_122911_093028.zip
PracticeName_XXXX_123011_125045.zip

Folder Name
PracticeName_XXXX_123011_125045 (Inside this folder there is sub folder importItems and other sub folders ... )

My questions are as follows:
1. Is there a naming convention to the ac backup filenames. From what I see it looks like the last part of the file name refers to the date and time when the backup started. Is this correct. If so
2. From earlier I remeber that there was only one .enc file for a daily backup. Has this changed
3. Do I need to keep all four files and the folder or just the enc file as it is taking a lot of space. The four files and folder is taking upto 200+GB every night.

If you need additonal information, please let me know.

Thanks for your time.

I looked in my Backup folder in the Amazing Charts Folder on the C drive of my main computer,and I only have several .enc files. I am using version 6.12. I don't have any .zip files or subfolders.

The entire AC Backup folder is unnecessary, IMHO, as long as you are backing up an .enc file daily outside of the AC folder. It just takes up space. You can use Amazing Utilities "Advanced" menu to "Delete outdated backups", but that still leaves a month worth of .enc files in the Backup folder. Since I keep several .enc files backed up elsewhere, I just delete all the files in the AC Backup folder periodically.

You should check the size of your Imported Items, my guess is that they are large enough that you'll need to back them up separately from your AC backup.

There are several threads here about the different technologies that folks are using just for Imported Items. Backup Assist, JungleDisk, etc

Back up assist is a great program!
My imports item folder is so huge I have to backup separately

OK, here is my take. I don't know much about backups, but this is my advice. First and foremost, go with the advice my anatomy professor used to say all the time. General to specific.

The first thing you want to do is ensure you have a nightly backup (say 3AM) 5 to 7 days per week preferably to several external hard drives. At least three. You don't want to overwrite, you want four, six, ten, whatever on each drive. But, make sure you back up the entire computer. Now, you can sleep. You have ALL your data (billing, imported items, AC, etc.) backed up. When you hard drive crashes, you can pop in another and be back in business in hours. Don't just think AC. While I use Backup Assist along with Adam and Leslie, I would recommend Acronis Backup and Restore 11. This link will bring you to the best software for your business IF you do not have a server. If you went that direction, I would talk to sales for all of your needs. This particular software will backup online at a certain time or in real time, back up locally (which you also want), backs up in full or incremental or deduplication (another discussion). It is now subscription so you pay so much per year. What is your practice worth? So, $176.00 (for everything) would be worth it. It also uses VSS (Volume Shadow Services), which means it uses Microsoft's technology to take a shadow backup of your computer which is key when you are backing up databases as you are backing up a snapshot of SQL. If SQL is running, your backup can be corrupted. So imagine, a company with the reputation of Acronis backing up your main computer locally AND to the cloud server. Coupled with their support, this would be incredible.

Now on to VSS again. A lot of people forget about the advantages of VSS. Microsoft supports VSS with every server operating system now and also in XP, Vista, WIN 7, etc. You may have to download some software for it, but it is easy. VSS not only runs when you do backups, it can also be set to copy shared folders at times designated by you. So, since SBS 2008 has VSS for backups, the same technology is taking snapshot backups of all of my folders on my data drive. So, I have over 20 copies of my imported items, my billing, my AC databases, etc. So, I can view, copy or restore any of these backups. So, say, one of your staff accidentally just deletes your entire II folder, oops!, the easiest restore method would be to right click on the II or AC folder, choose previous versions, and you will have five, ten, how many ever you chose at what time intervals right there. View the II folder from four hours ago, and there they are. Click restore (after doing a backup -- backups are always key), and you are set. And, you can't beat a Microsoft backup with Volume Shadow Service. But, you HAVE to enable it!

Now, for your backups. Just like John, I have no idea how you are getting all of those backups. I have one guess, but the zip files and folders make no sense. On the advanced section where you uncheck the II, etc. there are also two extra paths. Do you happen to have all three set to back up to the AC folder? That would explain part of it.

As Indy said, you likely need to stop backing up your imported items folder. It will just get too big. You can copy and paste it daily, weekly or whatever or it will back up with your whole computer backup. Alternatively, Acronis or Backup Assist can select simply the AC folder instead of the entire computer. You will never be able to back up online with imported items. There is not enough bandwidth. You simply need to do the backup of your database files, which will be zipped and encrypted but should always end with .enc for encrypted. Run some backups manually. I, personally, would not sleep at night if the ONLY backup I were doing were the AC backup on a schedule. If you were going to only use that backup, I would at least do it manually so you can see it was done. These are good backups, but it is only one, and I would never trust my entire practice data to one AC backup that doesn't even back up all of your files.

Backing up to the AC folder breaks the first rule of backups. You NEVER back up to the same drive that you are backing up. Having your backup in the backup folder INSIDE Amazing Charts is weak. Now support has told me they wanted to make sure that at least one good backup was made, which makes sense. But, make a path to another drive in the PC or, preferably, to an external drive. If you back them up before your nightly Acronis backup (or whatever company you use), that backup will back up all of the AC backups.

Now, another piece of information. As John said, these backups take up space. If you forget about them, you will soon have 30 of these backups. Now in your case you wouldn't, because you would run out of space at the rate you are going. Let's say you are doing Acronis backups. The more you back up the better. If you back up five, great. 100 even better. I have over one year's worth of all my data backed up. Why? So, I can find a back up from three months ago to use? No, that would be crazy. But, backups are also good for having copies of files that may have been deleted or corrupted two months ago. When you finally find out, it is too late if you are only making a daily backup which you are overwriting. If the file were deleted by someone on May 1, 2011; I can go back to April 30th and retrieve it.

BUT, the AC backups are different. More than two or three is overkill. You certainly can't restore from ten days ago. You can't go into those files and get individual files. Now, I suppose you could go to a sandbox machine and restore the backup there and find files, but all of the files are not backed up.

Also, as John said, you will want to delete the files not only from the AC folder but from your other destinations that I know you are making right now, lol. But, there are 3rd party programs which will do this for you based on number, dates, size, etc. One such program is Cyber-D's Auto-Delete Program which is very straightforward and could be set to only leave three backups or whatever you choose.

HTH.

At one time, the amazing charts online backup had a 250 MB limit. has that been increased?

I have never heard of its being that small. I am solo and my .enc file is 168MB. So, two backups, and I would be over the limit. I imagine there are others out there who .enc file is larger than 250MB. I am sure an email to support would give you the answer. Otherwise, you could find the size of your .enc file and continue to back up until it says you are full, and that would give you a rough estimate.

I have only Location 1 setup, but there is only one enc file in that folder. As Indy mentioned the size of my importeditems folder is around 45+ GB and the daily backup (.enc file) is around that number, but with the other additional files and folder the daily backup is consuming around 225 GB. Well the follow-up question is, it is safe to delete the Zip files and the folders as I do have the enc file.

it is safe to delete any of the backup folders or files. When you say 250GB, is that total oreach file.

Here is what I would do:

Just for now least:

Delete all backups except your latest .enc file in your AC folder (C:\Program Files\Amazing Charts\Backup\xxx.enc.)

Check the box next to Imported Items so your AC backups do not back up your imported items. Copy and paste that folder for now. You can NOT copy and paste the entire AC folder or anything containing the databases.

Delete all paths other than the default path set up by AC, meaning no paths or alternate locations. All backups should then be around 50MB and should have the .enc extension.

You can back up your II (imported items) manually, by third part software out even using Microsoft's free tool SyncToy.

Contact AC support in the morning as you clearly have something set up wrong.

I would be happy to remote into your computer and see what the issue is if possible.

Is there a way to turn off the backup insitu to the main computer backup file?
Thanks,

Bert, your ENC is only 168Mb? Mine is 2.3 Gb after only 2 years in practice.

Bert don't save no stinkin' Imported Items!

No

Not sure how you got that big of an .enc file. Are you importing Imported Items as well.

I can say that I have 25,000 progress notes. That would be an average of 20 per day. That's all I can say. But, I don't back up Imported Items. I do back up Exported Items, and they are 8.2GBs.

My actual AmazingCharts.mdf database is 987MB, but that is after compression with SSMS before it was 1.3+ GBs.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I think I have figured out what is happening.

I can only guess what the process is, unless some one from AC tech support can confirm it.
1. AC Backup creates a folder a named <Practicename>_XXXX_<Date>_<Time>
2. It then backs up the AmazingCharts Database file (I would assume the .ldf and .mdf) to .bak file and stores it inside the folder created in step 1
3. It also copies all the ImportedItems to the folder created in Step 1
4. As it is doing this all this is being done through a .tmp file
5. It them compresses and encrypts the file and stores it as one file named as <PracticeName>_XXXX_<Date>_<Time>.enc file
6. Then it deletes the Folder and Zip file

In my case since the drive was running out of disk space as it wanted more than 300+ GB free it did not delete those files. I will confirm my findings tomorrow as the backup is running right now and I have left enough space on the disk for it to complete successfuly.

I see the following files in the AC Backup folder while the backup is running
File -> ckz_P5DX.tmp
Folder -> <PracticeName>_XXXX_010312_093019

I know lots of people have suggested using a third party software to backup the importeditems folder, I have used most of them like SyncToy, BackupAssist, JungleDisk, Microsoft Backup with VSS.... etc. I will throw two more in the mix which is Microsoft RichCopy, RoboCopy etc. But I am thinking that AC provided the option to backup the imported files with their utility for some purpose. I would rather have one program backing up my data instead of managing multiple programs to do the work.

Can some one on AC techincal support confirm / deny that it is not a good idea to use their backup utility if the importeditems folder is huge (Please define huge with a number like 10+GB etc) and use a third party utility instead.

Thanks.

Glad you got it fixed or figured out. Could you clarify the above. I don't quite understand it.

I don't think that everyone's intent was to use 3rd party backup software just for Imported Items. As you can see from my rather lengthy post above, I suggested quite a few things. Your question about whether it is a good idea to backup your II is up to you. If you are backing up locally, then it isn't much of an issue. If you are trying offsite, then you won't be able to do it. I guess it depends how much space you have and how many backups you are going to keep. As I stated earlier, one doesn't really need many AC Backups.

I am not sure why one would have to make a decision as to whether to use AC's backup if the II are huge. If they become too big, then you just exclude them from your backup.

The backup programs you are using are not all the same. All of the sync options such as SyncToy, etc. aren't even in the same class as real backup software and should never be used as such. SyncToy is free. JungleDisk, Backup Assist and Microsoft's Native software all use VSS. You could use JD with the AC databases and II as it uses deduplication to back up each night.

Backup Assist uses the native Microsoft technology to do backups. I know I say this all the time, but I am not sure others agree with it. I don't think you should use Backup Assist to back up your II. I think you should use Backup Assist or some other product to back up your computer. The AC backups are very good and VERY specific. I use them every night manually. And, it would be the first backup I would use to restore. I also use the native backup of eMedware and the native backup of my non-II files. I just think you can never do enough backups. Backing up AC with its backup (which is built to exclusively backup what AC needs and works great) as your only backup is risky. Hopefully, you are backing them up to an external drive and not just on that computer. Also, you should never use SyncToy or other similar apps to back up SQL databases. The software must be able to utilize VSS or use tools like Open Files to backup databases that could be in use or connected to other programs.

So, it looks like you have done a great job. I would continue to back up your AC and II with its backup. But, I would back up your entire computer as well.

My use of AC Backup is to a USB drive and to an ethernet based drive which I have moved to the hospital building across the parking lot so it is secure if my building were to burn - I use AC BAckup with II every day - after about 10 years of data and imports my backup is 32 gig. My office scanned thousands of old charts and shredded them all (took a few years). AC backup works fine, but I would not want to try to upload 32 gig over internet every day.

This is where incremental backup is very useful. Hopefully AC will implement this soon. It'd make restores more difficult though.

EDIT: I hope you use an eSATA/USB 3 drive and gigabit Ethernet because that must take a while.