It is strongly recommended to use Second Copy 2000 which can be found at www.centered.com, or Veritas which is available in stores or at www.veritas.com. Set up multiple profiles for daily, weekly, and monthly. The database can not be in use when you make the backups using Second Copy. You don't have to shut down DentOffice, but there should definitely not be anyone using it. The backups should be set to run automatically in the middle of the night when nobody is using the computers. The files will be copied to other computers in the office. If you don't use a backup program, you will typically only have a single current backup, and that is simply not enough.
You also need to make weekly archive backups to CD, or if you have a lot of images (over 5000) in the Images module, to DVD. These should be stored off site and an occassional copy stored in a legally secure manner, such as with a lawyer.
If you do not know how to set up a backup strategy, get a networking specialist to come in. Show them this page so that they will understand exactly which folders to backup.
Copy These Two Folders
The backup process can be as simple as copying the following two folders to another location. A backup program can automate the task for you so that you won't forget or get confused during the copy process.
\\SERVER\mysql\data\opendental\
\\SERVER\OpenDentalData\
Specific Backup Instructions for Beginners
Sit down in front of your server and and locate this folder:
C:\mysql\data\opendental\
To locate the folder, double click on MyComputer, then double click on Local Disk (C:). Open on the folder called mysql, then the folder called data. Now, you will see a folder called opendental. Do not open this folder. Instead, rightclick on it (that's the lesser-used button). From the menu that comes up, select 'copy'. This places a copy on your clipboard, an internal memory location.
Then open the folder where you want to copy the file to. Perhaps you have a USB flash drive which can be seen in MyComputer as D:. Then you would double click on D: to open it and then rightclick on a blank area on the screen and select 'paste'. You should see the opendental folder appear in D:.
Follow the same process for the other folder:
C:\OpenDentalData\
Try to become familiar with this copy and paste process and make sure you understand where you are in the folder heirarchy. It is important that you not get confused during this copy process, because if you accidently copy from the D: drive onto the C: drive for instance, you could overwrite your data with old data or delete it altogether.
Hardware
The primary recommended strategy is to simply copy the folders to a different computer on your network. You can have one folder on a different computer, perhaps named 'backup'. Share this folder as described the Networking section. Inside this folder you would create a series of separate folders, each having a backup from a different date. These folders would probably be called Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Week1, Week2, Week3, Week4, Week5, Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.
By setting up daily, weekly, and monthly backups, you can restore to just about any previous point in time. You will need to do this some day; it is almost a guarantee. If your main hard drive stops working, or you get a virus, or you have some other type of problem, you will be thankful that you took the time to set up your backups.
The obvious problem is what do you do if you only have one computer? And what do you do about off-site backups? You can back up your data to a laptop and take it home with you. As long as you remember to back up before you leave the office in the evening, you would have a current backup and access to your data from home. Another similar option is to use a USB flash drive to take home the data with you. There are so many different hardware options out there that we can not begin to list them all. There are external drives, internal removable drives, external cases, full size, medium, and small drives, USB, USB2, firewire, ethernet, etc. Your best option is probably a USB flash drive which stores the data on a memory chip in a very small device that looks like a key fob. They typically max out at about 256 MB, so they will work fine as long as you don't have many scanned images. If you have more than a few thousand scanned images, then an external USB2 hard drive or a laptop might be necessary. Any of these solutions will be fast, and they are easy to connect to another computer later.
Verify the Backup
One key to making reliable backups is that you need to be able to verify that the backup is valid. The best way to do this is to take it home and try to run DentOffice on your home computer using the current backup. This will help you learn to trust your backup and to be able to verify on a regular basis that it is current and complete.
You start by installing all components of DentOffice on your home computer. Install it as a New Server. Then, you should be able to open the program and you will be using the original blank database that shipped with the program. Once you get it running, close it and then you can follow the instructions below every time you need to load your backup onto your home computer or laptop.
Important! You will have to follow these instructions very carefully to load a backup onto a second computer. It is still somewhat tedious and we are trying to simplify the process for you.