There are two main reasons why you should back up your ChartMaker® Medical Suite data: hard-drive failure and/or data corruption; or less commonly, a building fire or another similar type of catastrophe. In addition to ChartMaker's internal backup, we recommend that you backup your ChartMaker Medical Suite data with STI Offsite Backup Solution in addition to a NAS Backup Solution. The STI Offsite Backup Solution and NAS Backup provide you with the easiest and most reliable backup solution both on-site and off.
However, we also offer RDX Technology that is a disk cartridge storage solution that we highly recommend that you back up ChartMaker Medical Suite data on a daily basis using a different backup cartridge for each day of the week in which you are open, in addition to having two additional cartridges to rotate for a monthly backup. For example, say you are open 6 days a week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday), you would therefore need 8 cartridges: one for each day of the week you are open, and two other cartridges to rotate on a monthly basis (one for odd months, the other for even months).
Each day you will back up with the cartridge labeled for the day of
the week in which you are backing up, while the monthly cartridges should
be labeled appropriately as odd or even. It is also recommended that you
take these cartridges off site.
When installing your hardware and ChartMaker Medical Suite system, if you purchased hardware from us, the ChartMaker Medical Suite Hardware Technician will schedule your backup to automatically run everyday you are open at a specified time. It is recommended that you check your backup every day to verify that your ChartMaker Medical Suite data was backed up without errors. This is a two step process: you must verify that your Database Snapshot (i.e., the PCare.bak file) is current; and you must verify the backup reports in the software for the external backup device. Given the wide range of backup devices and software, we recommend that you contact your hardware vendor for specific steps in checking your backup for this latter step.
With ChartMaker Medical Suite fv2.9.1, a Backup Monitor has been implemented to monitor your Database Snapshot. In ChartMaker Medical Suite fv5.7, this process has been expanded and a new Backup Configuration dialog has been created allowing you to easily configure multiple databases for backup snapshot monitoring. When a database is configured, a warning will appear when logging into Practice Manager if the any of the backup snapshots are older than 3 days old, allowing you to quickly remedy the backup configuration. Databases that were configured in previous versions will be migrated to the Backup Configuration dialog, however, additional databases that were not previously configured, or if there are multiple databases, these databases will need to be manually configured in this dialog.
Your database snapshot is what actually gets backed up everyday on your backup tape/cartridge. The reason for the database snapshot is that a clean backup cannot be performed when the service is running. Therefore, everyday at a configured time (usually later in the evening when nobody is using the ChartMaker Medical Suite) the system takes a snapshot of the databases and writes these files to a STIBackup directory. It is from this STIBackup directory that your external backup device copies to tape/cartridge. For your current and past data to back up successfully it is very important that your database snapshot be configured correctly and the Backup Monitor, and now the Backup Configuration dialog, has been implemented to make this as easy as possible.
Use the following steps to configure the database backups to monitor.
In Clinical, click Edit
> System Tables > Database Backup.
In the Backup Configuration dialog, click the
Add button to add a database to
be monitored.
In the Select Backup File(s) dialog, browse to
the file location of the .bak
file or files you want the system to monitor (typically \\STISuite\STIBackup
on the AppServer), highlight the file or files (i.e., pcare.bak, auditpcare.bak,
etc.), and then click the Open
button. The selected databases will then be listed in the Backup Configuration
dialog along with the latest Backup Date.
NOTE: If no databases are configured in the Backup Configuration dialog,
a warning message will appear prior to logging into Clinical or Practice
Manager alerting you to configure this information.
Repeat steps 2 - 3 until all of the applicable
databases (.bak files) have been selected.
NOTE: A configured database can be removed from monitoring by highlighting
the database and then clicking the Delete
button.
When finished, click the Save button.