Almost every practice has a backup. Far fewer have one somebody has restored from on purpose, and that is the part that tells you it works.
A local copy, because restoring a large imaging database over an internet connection takes longer than anyone wants to sit through. An offsite copy, because a local copy does not survive a fire, a flood, or the kind of ransomware that goes looking for the backup drive first.
The offsite copy is the one that quietly matters most. A backup sitting on a USB drive next to the server only covers you for one kind of problem. A fire, a flood, or ransomware takes that drive along with the server.
Backup jobs fail. Software updates change a path, a drive fills up, a database gets locked at the moment the job runs. What matters is whether anybody notices when it stops working. Yours is monitored, and when a job fails we are the ones who go find out why.
Two questions decide how bad a bad day gets. How much work would you have to redo, and how long before you can see patients again. Those are decisions to make in advance, with a number attached, so everyone already knows the answer on the day it matters.
We will walk through both with you and build the backup around the answers, because more frequent copies and faster recovery cost more, and there is a point past which the cost stops making sense for a practice your size.
The practice management database and the images, which is what most people think of. Also the parts that are easy to miss: the machine those run on, its configuration, the shared files on the front desk computer, and the files a staff member has been saving to a local desktop for years.
HIPAA expects a practice to be able to recover patient records and to have thought about how. Documenting your backup and what it would take to restore covers a real part of that, and it is worth having written down before anybody asks you for it.
We are based in Katy and support practices across greater Houston and southeast Texas, from Sugar Land and Richmond to League City, Baytown, and The Woodlands.