Backing up Physician Office PC's

Backup, backup, backup - that's the name of the game. Your practice is nothing without good backups and SupportNet is seeing more and more physician offices that do not secure locally saved data on PC's.

With the growth of hosted Practice Management and EMR applications, practices are finding little need to install and maintain a server environment. The convenience is great. Users connect to practice software over the internet from any workstation available. This eliminates the costs associated with daily administration of a server and puts the server backup responsibility on the host company.

The byproduct of this topology is that practices are neglecting to backup other important files saved on the computers such as Microsoft Office, QuickBook or other applications. Since most Practice Managers or Directors don't share files with other office staff - because their responsibilities don't overlap - they don't need a central resource to share the files.

An easy and cost-effective solution to this is to install a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. SupportNet recommends a NAS server that can be RAID 5 configured for redundancy purposes. These devices can start at $800+ for 1 terabyte of storage and work off your current internal IP scheme (192.168.x.x). NAS servers do not run an operating system, thus eliminating the need to patch the OS, load anti-virus software or add/delete users.

After setting up the NAS, you can either map a drive from each PC to the device and save files directly to storage or create a script to backup locally saved files on a daily basis. Creating a script inherently creates some redundancy by maintaining files on both the PC and NAS.