Home Forums Discussions General Discussion How Bad is Backup & Restore ? (Cable Outages)

Hi,

With the spring weather comes the cable outage problems-this wouldn't be too bad except that I work Remotely--almost nightly. I wish that I could just backup AC on USB drive, take it home, restore it on my desktop so that I could finish my charts & reviews then backup that work and restore at my office. Everything that I have heard so far is that the backup & restore is not quite as reliable as it should be--I am concerned about data loss. Is this an unwarranted fear or is there some other solution to my cable outage problems ?

Thanks

p.s. I use Dragon Dictate Medical 10.1 - & it works better onsite than remotely

Backup and Restore is quite reliable. It is syncing that is not quite right.

Biggest issue with backup and restore is that you have to take the time to:
1)backup just before you leave the office,
2)then restore at home,
3)then backup after changes at home and
4)restore in the office upon return.

Will work if you have a power outage, but given each backup/restore might take 20-30 minutes, you are using a lot of time.

Maybe only do it if the weather is looking bad, otherwise either wait until you get back to the office or remote in with RDP or LMI.

Thanks for the information. If the sync is a problem, has anyone used any 3rd party sync programs that are reliable [that would cut my time down dramatically-rather than doing backup and restore operations] ?

Jack

Anything your ISP can do to reduce downtime?

You can always get something like a fractional T1 with an SLA just for remote access. (dedicated line, quite pricey but it is reliable.) Will be pricey but if you're willing to spend 20-30 minutes backing up and restoring, might as well get it. See a few extra patients instead and I'm sure the cost will be offset easily.

OK. In your original post, you were talking about a very secure and reliable way to do this. Backup and Restore as Wendell says. Now, rather than back it up to a flash drive and risk losing it, why not find a secure (hopefully HIPAA compliant) online sync like Dropbox or Google Drive or Egnyte. Problem is after ten years or so, not one will claim they are actually HIPAA compliant. I don't mean backup companies like iDrive or Carbonite and some that claim it there. But, for the sake of argument, let's say you find one you feel comfortable using:

You simply set your AC Backup to back up to a folder on your PC and have another path that goes to say, Google Drive. By the time you get home, you have a good backup on your computer and one in the cloud. You download that one to your remote computer, restore it, work two hours, then make another backup to Google Drive that you can download at work. The nice thing about Google Drive, and I am sure all of them, is it time stamps it, so you won't restore the wrong one at work. Plus, it should be larger if only by a few Kbs.

How would that work? The file is encrypted. All of these sync clouds are secure. Some more than others like Egnyte and Verecloud (Pretty cool site -- offers Exchange and SharePoint). So, it all depends if you are looking at encryption to a very, very secure server that may not meet all the government criteria. It's still safer than a flash drive in your car.