Encryption and backups

[dsanders]

For my brother's practice we currently backup to external hard drives and then he takes them home. Additionally, I am working on backing up directly to my house.

If someone broke in and stole a computer or external hard drive they could potentially have a bunch of people's personal information. Is anyone encrypting their data? If so how are you going about it? I am using Linux for the server OS.

[jordansparks]

Yes, they could. The only good solution I can think of is to physically lock down your hard drive/computer with metal straps and quality locks. Or, you could take the data home, restore it to make sure it works, then delete it from the computer, and physically secure the USB drive in a safe.

[fschiopu]

hi,

I'm currently using truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org) to create an encrypted partition where i store all the sensitive data about the patients (including mysql database). It is opensource and they have a linux version too.The software can use an entire drive or a single file on any drive and has a few encryption algorithms that can be used . It also can be used to encrypt an usb flashdrive. In case the drive gets stolen nobody can mount the partition and read the data without the password.

[wjstarck]

I have found Retrospect to be a really robust solution for our practice. We use version 7.5 for Windows. They have Mac and Linux clients.

There is a nice add on known as 'Open File Backup' which allows you to have your OD database backed up while mysql is running which is a really nice feature. Data encryption is also available.

We bought an HP m7060n running Windows 2003 server which has a bay for a removable hard drive, which holds 160 GB.

We have two such drives, so they are swapped out like so:

Drive 1: MWF
Drive 2: TThSaS

We have regular scripts set up for each computer and then these two

OpenDental PRN MWF
OpenDental PRN TThSaSu

are run just before I do any upgrading to Open Dental

Works very nicely for me.