Home Forums Discussions General Discussion AC Amazing Backup Service

Anybody have any comments regarding their experience with the Amazing Charts Amazing Backup Service ?

When the AC Amazing Backup service came out over 15 years ago, it was quite limited and didn't do incremental backups and couldn't handle imported items well, so I didn't adopt it (used other services instead).
The limitations have long since been removed. How is it working for you now?

...Ken
p.s.

In case you haven't heard, Crashplan is exiting the home backup market.

A long time ago, it may have been limited, but it produced the best backup of any backup program that existed on the face of the earth. Better than ShadowProtect, better than Veeam, BackupAssist or Acronis. Now, I find it to be the worse backup server on the face of the earth.

Following up on Ken's question, if you do an off-site backup now, can you download it on your own, and is that downloaded backup fully usable without AC's help?

Bert, why do you say it is the worse? We just signed up and have not had to reinstall a backup copy but now I am nervous that it might not work! We just went through Hurricane Irma, Maria may be on the way and I need to be confident that if the wore happens I still have my data!

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.

For backups, I've been pushing Veeam very hard. Elaboration:

* It does both local and offsite backup for a reasonable cost.
* It's "forever incremental" backup is awesome.
* All of my clients are virtualized. So if we do a restore, we don't just restore AC, we restore the entire Virtual machine.
* I can pull out individual files from a virtual machine backup if needed.

In every case, clients have more to restore than just AC. For example, user My Documents are redirected to the server. Another example is not having to rebuild a domain controller and all the Group Policy settings that go with it.

JamesNT

Hi imed,

Sorry. Probably a little strong there. And, to be honest, I am trying to figure out what I was referencing. If you are running version X of AC and you are doing a local backup of version X, then you won't have any issues with it. In fact, it will likely be a great backup just like before. It sounds like you just started and that's great. So, you may not be familiar with everything that has been going on over the past year with installing AC on a new machine or installing a higher version and trying to restore with an older version. Just confusing, a lot of hoops, forced help from AC support. It will work, but you may have to get help from support. To be honest, I am so confused now, I can't even explain it. But, I am rather sure if you do a backup, you will be able to restore it to the same program you backed it up from.

But, you should have separate backup software as well.

Which version of AC do you have? I'm going to guess that is 9.1 or lower.

In helping another client prep for Irma, I discovered that with newer versions (9.2+ iirc) AC will only allow one database to active, which means a practice can no longer have a backup server credentialed. If you credential a backup server, then the main server becomes useless.

AC has necessitated clients virtualizing in self-defense. Since I can (and have) talked a client on the phone through a CentOS install in less than 30 minutes, they can take ANY computer with the minimal specs, install CentOS, and then launch their VM, or a copy without having to depend on AC to be available to activate the database so they can get into their own data.

It is EXTREMELY handy to have 3-4 copies of your AC server on different drives (still protected by password by the nature of virtualization), with a separate store of your latest .bak and imported items - you are then minutes away from running where YOU want to run your EMR.

True. You can have 30 copies on 30 computers. You just have to be credentialed by AC on a computer that hasn't run the database.

Not saying you can't do it the above way. Just sayin' it isn't how many.

They, hopefully, are working to change this.

If you are working with a copy of the credentialed VM, it will work no matter what machine you start it on.

Yep, with a VM it will work anywhere.

Which is yet another reason to add to the multitudes of reasons we already have to virtualize.

JamesNT