Backup solution for small dental office

Lucasta

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 22, 2007
Messages
79
Hey guys I recently acquired a dental office to maintain as I've been going there for years and one day the Dr calls me up and asks me if i wanted to take over his IT work...im like YES!
So anyway the previous guy had purchased a new Dell PowerEdge T420 earlier in the year and we are in the process of replacing about 12 pc's now. They use a program called Dentrix to maintain patient files. This db is backed up to an online service nightly however there is no other backup solution for the server itself. The thought of having it go down and having to rebuild from scratch is not something i want to do if at all possible. What are some hardware options to do a full system backup? I'd like to keep this option under $1000 but have it be reliable as well. The server is running Server 2012 standard. I looked at the Dell PowerVault RD1000 earlier it seems ok but id rather have something internal that would be faster. Any help you can offer would be much appreciated. Thanks :)
 
Have you ever messed with server backup built into the os? You can basically stick in a spare disk and have a nightly backup grab a copy of the full machine every night and / o do incremental and then full weekly or monthly. How big is your database? I would recommend a high quality drive like a wd red or even an enterprise drive to backup to.

Also you need to be real careful with medical data as there are severe restrictions to patient confidentiality so backing up to like Amazon s3 nightly is probably a no no.
 
As rhansen5_99 mentioned... get very familiar with HIPAA, pronto.
Having an internal drive or set of drives, IMO, does not qualify as backup. If the PSU goes south and fries everything, you've lost your primary and "backup" in short order.

I assume you've worked out at least a rough DR and BC plan? What is the RPO and RTO? How much data is there now, and what is the forecast for the next 3 years?
 
Thread moved. The people here should be able to help you better.
 
Is there a budget for monthly recurring costs? If so, you can tackle backup and DR with one appliance. We have been reselling Datto for about 2 years now and they are great. Local and onsite image-based backup. I have had to do several emergency recoveries (physical servers to VMWare when they die). It's easy and flat works. Bunch of different options for features/cost, worth looking at IMO.

Otherwise, we've got lots of customers running Windows backup to an iSCSI target on a NAS. Seems to work OK, but doesn't get data offsite and your options aren't as great for doing a quick recovery in the event of hardware failure. If you decide to go this route, you can get a nice Synology NAS and a couple of WD Red drives for under your $1000 mark.

I wouldn't recommend any solution with USB drives for backup unless you want to have to mess with it often. We've done it with Backup Exec, Acronis, Windows backup and they're all unreliable to USB drives.
 
RPO and RTO havent even been discussed and to be honest I dont think the good Doc would have a clue on any of that. He is NOT technologically savvy at all and its very hard to communicate with him on technical things. According to the Dentrix website the online backup they provide is HIPPA compliant. I know that covers the patient data but i would like to have something to do a complete server backup as well. As far as how much data they have currently? I would say no more than 5-10 gigs at most if that.

Now to give you some back ground, Ive been in the IT field for years doing helpdesk work and have run a small pc repair business from my home doing basic repairs and cleanups. This is my first actual business client in a situation as this, so I want to make this a lasting relationship and also one that will fit his needs and protect his office data. I take this very seriously as this is a great opportunity financially and for the knowledge gained.

again guys i thank you for any and all info you can provide. I want to do this right and to meet his needs and mine.
 
as another IT provider who supports dental offices, and my wife's office running dentrix.

use system image built into windows. the dr and staff most likely will not want to take a hard drive home with them each night, so just leave it near the server.

HIPAA rules do apply and you do need items to be encrypted, however it gets a bit carried away.

I usually do online backup and local backup.

I usually have the client in Hyper-V so I use Altaro and Encrypt it.
 
Most dental/medical are cheap. Selling Datto may not be feasible. However the Alto unit is free just pay for service.

So depending on who was raping them for online backup it may make sense. I know some charge $3/GB for Dental/Medical online backup.

If you need help reach out to me.
 
3-2-1 Rule with backups

3 copies of the data
2 different backup mediums/media
1 is offsite

I'd look into placing a 2 bay Synology into a locked office and backup to that. Then backup the data to the cloud through the Dentrix service. The Synology does support AES folder encryption. Just make sure you maintain HIPAA compliance.
 
RPO and RTO havent even been discussed and to be honest I dont think the good Doc would have a clue on any of that. He is NOT technologically savvy at all and its very hard to communicate with him on technical things. According to the Dentrix website the online backup they provide is HIPPA compliant. I know that covers the patient data but i would like to have something to do a complete server backup as well. As far as how much data they have currently? I would say no more than 5-10 gigs at most if that.

RPO and RTO are extremely easy to communicate and sort out. You can start the talk with two easy questions:
1) How much data loss, in time, is considered acceptable? Know that the less time allowed, the higher the cost. 4 hour RPO will be cheaper than 2 hour.
2) How long of system down time is acceptable? More time may be cheaper (depending!), and give you some flexibility in fixing root cause rather than band-aiding. But the BC plan needs to cover this entire RTO (usually some form of reversion back to paper charting), and allow for data entry re-work once the system is available again.

Once you have those, you can start to talk to the DR and BC plans a little more - this is where you'll "save" them from the technical details, though make absolute sure that you have it documented in a standard, complete format. Visio diagrams, procedure sheets for restoring and so on. Make sure your decisions are driven by the business's input.
 
OP, I suggest getting familiar with what it means to be a BA. :-D

With regards to the backup solution, it will depend on what his needs are. If he can afford a couple of days downtime in the event of a server outage while you rebuild it, then that may be his best option as it will only cost him money in the event something happens. If he needs to be back up and running in a shorter amount of time, that's when other technical solutions will be needed. It might also be worthwhile to understand the build requirements that Dentrix has to know how easy it would be to stand it up elsewhere.
 
OP, I suggest getting familiar with what it means to be a BA. :-D

With regards to the backup solution, it will depend on what his needs are. If he can afford a couple of days downtime in the event of a server outage while you rebuild it, then that may be his best option as it will only cost him money in the event something happens. If he needs to be back up and running in a shorter amount of time, that's when other technical solutions will be needed. It might also be worthwhile to understand the build requirements that Dentrix has to know how easy it would be to stand it up elsewhere.

This. I've come into places that were panicking after being quoted $20k for a backup solution, only to find out that they had gone without their system for a week before, with the only cost being a weekend of overtime to have someone manually enter the week's records into the computer system. I've also gone into places to swap out a router, and had the MOD tell me "You have 15 minutes".

For offsite backup, you may be able to use something like CrashPlan for simplicity. I don't know if their "cloud storage" is HIPPA compliant, but you can encrypt the backup and have it back up to a remote computer instead (say, if the dentist has a decent home office).
 
I will talk with him again and find out more about his rto/rpo needs are see what kind of a budget we have to work with. I believe he may be ok with the patient data for now but I would still like to have another solution in place. You can never have too much backup imo. Thanks for the help thus far fellas. Ill keep you posted as Im sure ill have more questions :)
 
Make sure to talk to Patterson Dental about what the requirements for database restoration are. We have a couple dental office clients and Dentrix doesn't use a standard SQL or MySQL database. For the backups to happen you have to run a stop script, run a backup script, then run start again. It's a horrible backup system and database. They will stick you with making sure the backups actually run and are restorable.
 
Make sure to talk to Patterson Dental about what the requirements for database restoration are. We have a couple dental office clients and Dentrix doesn't use a standard SQL or MySQL database. For the backups to happen you have to run a stop script, run a backup script, then run start again. It's a horrible backup system and database. They will stick you with making sure the backups actually run and are restorable.
Eaglesoft is the practice management system Patterson Dental creates. Henry Schein is Dentrix. Further, dentrix has an enterprise version which uses Oracle or MSSQL. It's missing a lot of functionality the core product has.

And if it's helpful to anyone, I can work magic with dentrix enterprise and the database. One of my clients used to spend all monday morning running reports and updating their stats, but I've been able to automate the entire process by banging on the database directly. Which is doubly good because Dentrix's report generator is DOG slow.
 
2 Bay NAS
Storagecraft ShadowProtect Server Copy
3 External drives for rotation

Set ShadowProtect to backup nightly with Encryption to the NAS. Use SC ImageManager to consolidate. Hook up external drives daily to the QNap and use it's internal program to replicate to the drives. Have a office person take the drive home every night and rotate them.

All this for around $500 or so in hardware/software and maybe 30 minutes of your time setting it up.
 
I've used both Datto and StorageCraft Server and both work pretty well especially for smaller environments.

Whatever you decide on, have an offsite plan and a method to recover file level and bare-metal if needed. If their workstations have internet access and access to the server make sure the backup can't be destroyed by something like Cryptolocker.
 
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