Backing up your data with Liptak Dental's DDS Rescue system

If you’ve read my dental columns over the years, you know I’m incredibly finicky about computer backups. A digital office is absolutely dependent on a consistent and repeatable backup schedule. I cannot stress that fact enough.

The saying among geeks like myself is, “The failure rate of hard drives is always 100%.”

No matter how hard you try to avoid it, you will have a hard drive failure eventually. Because of that I’ve taken to referring to the office backup strategy as a “backup chain.” By this I mean there needs to be multiple backups run on a regular basis.

This can be a series of USB portable hard drives (one for each day of the week) that are taken off site every evening, an indestructible hard drive like ioSafe that is left on site but is impervious to fire and water, and a Cloud based backup as well.

Using a strategy such as this greatly reduces the chance of a catastrophic data loss. However, there still are situations that arise that even a good backup won’t completely solve.

Preparing for the worst
Imagine a phone call from your front office staff as you are about to leave for the office telling you your server is down and no amount of pushing buttons is bringing it back to life.

In most instances this would necessitate a call to your IT professional and you would be waiting until someone was actually able to get to your office. Meanwhile patients, unaware of the problem, are arriving at your office because you have no way of contacting them and you certainly have no way of knowing what treatment is needed.

What about a virus? If a virus were to somehow get loose on your network and corrupt data, what would you do? Or what about a power failure? Living in the Midwest, I’ve had to deal with ice storms that took my office down without power for several days. In a situation such as that, how would you contact and reschedule your patients?

All of the above scenarios (and many more) happen every day to lots of businesses, but what if there was a way to know your data was being continually backed up and kept safe in both your office and The Cloud? Even better what if your data could be accessed from either of those locations in the event of an emergency? Does that grab your interest? It should. The best part is you can have that type of backup and it’s available right now.

Rescue plan The DDS Rescue system is now available from Liptak Dental Services and will provide the kind of backups discussed above…without any intervention on the part of you or your staff.

The DDS Rescue system is an onsite device-a computer that plugs into your network. Once plugged in and powered on, it is quickly set up by Liptak staff over the Internet.
Once configured, the device begins making copies of your data (up to 30 per day) and storing these on the device. This ensures your current data, as well as multiple past versions, are stored and available.

The device is constantly at work to back up your data and in the event of a server crash or other serious problem, it provides you access to your data. A phone call to Liptak Dental can have you accessing the data on the DDS Rescue device in as little as 10 minutes.

However, that’s not all the device does. The DDS Rescue device also connects to the Internet and uploads your data to The Cloud where it is stored in multiple encrypted data centers. These complete copies of your server can be booted up on the Web so all of your practice and business data can be accessed even if your office is without power! This means you will never be without access to your data as long as you have an Internet connection.

The system also is monitored to ensure the backups are bootable and working. To provide the office with the peace of mind that all is well, the system will even send you an email showing it has booted the server copy.

There also is the peace-of-mind that comes with knowing that even if the device is stolen or destroyed all of your data will be loaded on a new device and shipped to you.

I’ve been personally using the DDS Rescue system for more than 6 months now and have been incredibly pleased with the device and the service. There is a great feeling of confidence knowing that my data will be available to me in a worst case scenario disaster. The emails that arrive every 24 hours let me know my system is running and my data is available.

While I’m still recommending the “backup chain,” I rest easier knowing that one of those links resides with the DDS Rescue device.