An Ounce of Prevention Back up your files to properly care for your data

by David Orenstein freelance writer

Is there some sound, proven advice that you give to patient after patient, only to be frequently ignored? How about, “Eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly”? Computer advice columnists have the same problem. We tell people to back up their files regularly and we often are ignored.

I hope you don’t need this advice. Patient records, billing data, correspondence, notes, e-mails, contact lists, and other kinds of files are of obvious importance. Perhaps your practice management software includes a backup feature that can take care of the data it creates. But that’s only a fraction of your data. Odds are that you alone are responsible for making sure that all of your data is protected from accidental deletion, system crashes, computer theft, or some other disaster—know any Houston colleagues who lost data to last year’s flood?

If you aren’t backing up, that probably is because the process is boring and tedious. There is no question that maintaining the health of your patients is more important than maintaining the health of your data. But backups are like oil changes: If you don’t do them, you will create a problem that eventually limits your ability to do what you really need to do.

There certainly is no shortage of options for backups. Several retail software programs (all between $40 and $80) have features that make effective backups manageable. They will guide you through backing up your entire hard drive or just important parts of it. Many will let you create a “rescue” disk you can use to automatically restore your computer’s data in the event of a catastrophe. The programs will compress data so more of it fits on your disk, and some will encrypt the data so it is secure even if the disk gets lost. Finally, the programs will schedule backups for you so you don’t have to remember to do them. A few titles (no endorsements here) are Retrospect Express Backup, Backup Now Deluxe, Nova Backup, Drive Image, or Norton Ghost.

If you don’t want to buy software, you can do the backup yourself. A general rule is that programs always can be reinstalled from the original disks, but the files you create are unique and irreplaceable. When you create a file, copy it to another disk off your hard drive. Otherwise, periodically search your documents folders for files created or modified since you last backed up. Copy those newer files to another disk.

That disk can be anything from an old-fashioned 3-1/2” floppy (1.44 megabytes) to a digital tape that will hold 24 gigabytes (more than 16,000 floppy disks). Here’s a quick guide:

• Floppies. Tiny, but dirt cheap and universal. Useful only for individual documents.

• Zip disks. Capacity of 100 or 250 megabytes. $150 for the drive, $15 a disk. Beats its floppy ancestors, but it’s not the cheapest or most convenient way to go.

• CDs. Recordables (CD-R) and Rewritables (CD-RW) have a capacity of up to 700 megabytes. $200 for the drive, 50 cents a CD-R disk (that can be used only once), or $1 for a reusable CD-RW. CDs are very cheap per megabyte.

• DVDs. Capacity up to 4.7 gigabytes. Drives cost $500, various recordable DVDs cost $6 to $12 each. Bigger disks are more convenient, but standards are unsettled and cost per megabyte is higher than with mature CDs.

• Tapes. So-called “DAT” tapes hold well more than 20 gigabytes. Drives cost $700 to $2400. Tapes cost about $40. This hardcore option can back up entire servers.

Backing up is important and a variety of technologies are standing by to help you. Now all you need is the discipline to follow some sound advice, boring though it may be.

David Orenstein is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. To learn more about a technology topic in Computing Care, e-mail him at davealli@attbi.com.