How Do You Backup Your OpenDental?

[DrHamilton1993]

Hi, im a new office learning to use OpenDental and I read about backing up my OpenDental folders and database.

I was curious how you guys back up your OpenDental such as:

• What folders or methods do I need to back up?

• How often do you back up?

• What services or hardware do you use to back up too

• If you use a service, whats it called and how much do you pay? Do you have an IT guy do it for you?

Thanks in advance for your advice and insight.

[joergzastrau]

Dear Dr. Hamilton,

We are using Open Dental (OD) since early 2022. Until now, we have relied on ODs manual backup method and local supplemental backups. We have tested a different backup solutions (e.g. bacula, rclone, backup to USB Stick) in parallel.

Our setup since last week is:

We backup to a secure HIPAA compliant Cloud storage (a logical drive letter) every night using the following software:

- Paragon Backup & Recovery for the A-Z folder, nightly differential backup and full backup every week.
- SQLBackupAndFTP for the SQL Database, nightly full backup.

Retention for old backups is 6 month. The costs for the cloud storage was a one time payment below 1000$ for 2TByte. We used the free versions of the two mentioned software products for testing and are now on a business plan for productive use. I recommend to request quotes for the business versions before testing.

We synchronize the cloud storage to a computer at a different location automatically and test the backup once per month on the used Thinkcenter m710q (120$ on EBay) according to the OD instructions. This Computer runs the trial version of OD. Thus, the "opendental" database must be restored to the "demo" database on the test computer. Also, the location of the A-Z folder must be eventually changed manually.

This is a low cost solution suitable for small offices and involves medium IT experience. I was first worried to rely on low-level playback of the SQL Database because OD introduced some security measures against modifying the database by third parties. We made the switch (or rather stopped using the OD native backup) because it worked for us for over two years now. This saves us some manual work.

We did not turn off the supplemental backups provided by OD. We do however store them locally rather than with OD and we have never tested if they work.

I would suggest to also consult with your companies for 3D scanning and X-Ray software on how to restore the data in case of a computer failure within a day and without paying a premium fee. This seems to be a dark area by my experience (I am guilty of not testing the backup recovery before the nightmare hit).

With best regards

Joerg

last edit: 08/11/2024 18:30