Home Forums Discussions Problems Hurricanes

OK, so several years ago my server crashed and I did a bare metal restore and it worked like a charm. Windows 2008 server went out and found all the drivers and Amazing Charts was up and running from the backup without a hitch. So my plan for hurricanes was always to do a bare metal restore to a laptop and run everything I needed from there. With the new licensing, this doesn't sound possible. How do I prepare for a hurricane now?

I'm also in Florida, and I worry about this too, having seen the destruction by a few of these storms in the past. I'm 50 miles inland, so less likely to have my equipment swamped by a storm surge than you. But you make a good point. After a major storm, I can no longer run my office EMR, even with replaced equipment & generator power, as I have done twice in the past. I need internet & phone now to have AC restore from a backup. I can't even test my backups. So why am I running AC on my own network? I can't answer that question any more.

I can empathize with you gents, back around the time Jon Bertman sold, that hurricane hit the Eastern seaboard, and I talked a Doc through bringing up his backup on a laptop plugged into his truck in a water-logged parking lot.

In contrast, we have twice recently had practices reach out to us on the weekend, and we can't help them. In the past, we have even spun up an instance and brought the practice up in our environment after their server died, so they could see patients Monday morning without interruption.

The current status quo won't stand.

You can still restore from a bare metal/image back without having to contact AC. The activation key only applies during the installation of Amazing Charts. So it will not affect you if you're restoring from an image-based backup.

It makes it a lot harder for providers like Indy, James, and I to spin up temporary boxes when a server crashes. Maybe giving us Certified IT Support or the docs the ability to automatically request an installation key from the portal would be better.

I had a practice the other week whose 8-year-old server crashed. I have no idea what the IT guy was thinking. They're are over 40 people working at this one office not including their branch location. They lose thousands for every hour of downtime. We had a host server and managed to get them up and running in a few hours by cloning their disks into a virtual machine. That thing should've been replaced at least 3 years ago. This was the best solution for this practice anyways. Giving 40 people a new environment would've been crazy. This was only possible because the practice was local. Transmitting a terabyte over the Internet doesn't work that well...

With the distant practices, it's much easier for us to just download their AC file backup and restore it to a new environment for rapid restore.

I'm signed up for the online back up mainly for peace of mind. But I do want to share my Hurricane Irma experience. I contacted AC support and setup the entire practice on a dedicated laptop with their help. Awesome. Kept it and some fresh backups with me through the hurricane and never worried about not having a patients chart close to hand whether or not we had electricity, internet or whatever. I'm going to keep a backup laptop from now on.