This morning we had a customer call us in a panic. Their server had crashed and lost all their data files. This could have been a moment of severe trouble, but they had taken the time every day as a precaution and it made all the difference. We had them back up and running with no loss of data within 20 minutes and all because the pharmacy staff had done a Daily Backup.
Your pharmacy data is precious to your company, you have likely invested thousands of hours of manpower and thousands of dollars in entering and processing it. It has your patient’s insurance information, allergy sensitivities, prescription history and HIPAA agreement signatures. It has your payment history, e-prescribed archive, security access information and the list goes on and on.
Basically, your entire pharmacy all resides on that one computer. Sounds scary, right?
Fortunately, we have nearly a dozen different ways to take care of your data so that if something happens to that server, you’re not out of luck and starting from scratch.
Here is a list of your data backup options. All of the backups that we support are encrypted and protected from access from anyone that isn’t authorized. If you aren’t doing one of these processes, contact our support office and we can help you choose the best option for you. We even have one customer that has elected to do all of them, because they take their data very seriously.
Local Media Backup
If you have access to your physical server you can put the data on a number of different forms of media including these.
- USB/Flashdrives – One of the fastest and largest of the backup media. We suggest having one for each day of the week, and rotating through the drives.
- CDR/CDRW – The slowest and smallest of the backup media, but also one of the cheapest. CDs are being phased out due to the slow nature, and small storage size.
- DVD – A slower form of backup, but can usually house all the data your server uses. This is another form that is being phased out.
- Tape Drive – One of the largest types of backup media, fairly slow. Used by nearly none of our customers any more, but can be preferred by large companies with particular IT departments that prefer tape drives.
Internet Backup
If you have access to the internet, you can have your data uploaded to one of our secure servers here at the FSI office nightly, automatically. A month’s worth of backups are archived, and helps us to have direct access to your data if a recovery is necessary.
Synology/Network Drive Backup
If you do hard copy scanning, or if you want to automate your backup process your best option for doing backups would be the Synology backup system. Something that is less known by our customers is that our other backup solutions do not backup hard copy images. The Synology device resides on your network and your server will send not only all of its pharmacy data, but all of the scanned images as well. The Synology system is also capable of doing backup duplication by backing itself up to other media, such as an external hard drive as well.