dentalblogs.com

Burn a new CD or DVD every Sunday night and store them at your brother-in-law’s office.
Buy five $200 external hard drives and hope your office doesn’t burn down. 
Do nothing and don’t worry about backup. (We suggest closing your eyes, plugging your ears and repeating “I’m in my happy place, I’m in my happy place.”)
Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend’s server over his DSL line. 
 

[Read more →]

New News From PC Magazine: IBM Software Offers Constant Data Backups [1]

IBM is hoping to take the guilt trip out of the backup process with their latest software, the Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files, which is aimed at the average user and automatically works quietly behind the scenes, like antivirus software. On Friday, IBM announced that they would use Digital River, Inc. to distribute the software to consumers through online retailers such as OfficeMax, Staples, and Circuit City Stores, among others. The software, also available via download on ibm.com and through other sales channels, costs $35 per laptop or desktop PC.

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1992544,00.asp

[Read more →]

The following comes directly off the Iomega press release

Reliable data backups are a necessity in all businesses. Yet the most common storage alternatives have limitations as backup devices. Optical drives have weaknesses of reliability, capacity, and speed.  Hard drives are not an archive medium and compared to a REV disk, they have weaknesses of shock and vibration reliability and expandability. Tape drives, which are designed for backup, require regular head cleaning and have weaknesses of drive cost, speed, and reliability. The tapes themselves require periodic tape re-tensioning and careful storage.
Compared to these options, Iomega’s REV products are a uniquely simple and reliable backup technology. Designed to provide the performance of a hard drive with the removability of tape, the REV technology has garnered many industry awards as an ideal tape-replacement solution for SMBs because of its durability, rewritability, reliability, and excellent price-performance.
This is not inexpensive. The Rev drive is $600 and the disks are $70 ea. Look here [1] for details. Iomega has identified health care specifically as an industry that would benefit from the Rev system.

[1] http://www.iomega.com/na/landing.jsp

[Read more →]

Look here  Mozy Remote Backup: [1]

Free remote backup is finally here! Download and install Mozy to ensure your data is safely backed up at a secure, remote location.
Mozy is a secure, automatic remote backup service for any PC in any home or office. It’s simple to install and configure. No external hard drive, expensive subscription services, CD’s or DVD’s to burn. All you need is a broadband connection and you are ready to go!
This is a beta product and as such I don’t recommend it as your primary back up for office data. However it is worth looking at for future reference. Also for dental data we need a HIPPA conformant back up.

[1] http://mozy.com/

[Read more →]

The most devastating computer failure for most dental offices would be a hard drive failure of the server. If the hard drive failed or was damaged it is possible to loose data and it could take days to get your computer system running properly again. There are many safeguards designed to prevent this and to help you recover data. However one of the best is to have a mirrored RAID (random array of inexpensive disks) hard drive installed on the server.
A mirrored hard drive automatically copies all data to two hard drives simultaneously. In that way the office has an up to the second back up copy of everything. In the event of a drive failure it is possible to keep everything running without even a moment’s confusion. A simple mirror device using two drives is called RAID 1.
Commonly vendors will propose a more complex three drive system called RAID 5, which requires the use of costly SCSI based drives. This system is even better than RAID 1, but it is A LOT more money. Like five times more; but it isn’t five times better.
The vast majority of dental offices should have a RAID 1, but do not need to spend the extra money on a SCSI Raid 5.
 

[Read more →]

Read the whole review here: Comodo Personal Firewall 2.0 review by PC Magazine [1]

Comodo Personal Firewall is a kick-ass free firewall. It keeps hackers out and tricky unauthorized programs off the Internet. And it resists being terminated. It works as well as all but the best for-pay firewalls—and did I mention it’s free?

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1969207,00.asp

[Read more →]

This comes from a New York Times [1] technology Q&A column
As a general rule computers need to be upgraded every three to four years. When you get rid of the old computer you can either throw it away, give it away or recycle it. However it leaves your office we have an ethical and legal obligation to be sure there is no personal medical information left on the hard drive. The following addresses these issues.

Taking Extra Steps to a Clean DiskQ. I was in a store recently to buy a new computer, and asked for software to delete my files permanently before donating my old PC. The sales clerk said I didn’t need to buy the software, as I can do this in Windows by reformatting my drive with the Format command. Will that work?A. The Format command is often used to prepare a disk for installing (or reinstalling) an operating system, but it does not securely erase all data from the computer. People who know how to dig around and recover data may still be able to mine personal information from your old PC.Most experts suggest that computer users who need to securely and permanently erase data from a hard drive (the Pentagon, for instance) either physically destroy the drive or use a software utility to thoroughly overwrite all its information. It may take some time, but a good wipe program can repeatedly overwrite your hard drive with random data from 7 to 35 times to erase any personal files lingering on the drive.There are many commercial software programs for Windows in the $40 to $50 range that can completely erase your hard drive, like WipeDrive (www.whitecanyon.com) and CyberScrub Privacy Suite (www.cyberscrub.com). There are also free options, like Eraser (www.heidi.ie/eraser) and Darik’s Boot and Nuke (dban.sourceforge.net), a small program that can be loaded onto a diskette or recordable CD and used to wipe your drive clean.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/technology/01askk.html?ex=1306814400&en=33e79cb0a03434d0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

[Read more →]

PC magazine has a very good article on back up strategy and devices. The whole article is here  Your Backup Battle Plan [1]

An effective data backup strategy means knowing what needs to be backed up, including regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which has specific backup requirements. You should also determine whether data should be backed up or archived. Most businesses do both. Backups are copies of active data for short-term use and are frequently overwritten with updated versions. The three types of backup are full (which backs up all files regardless of whether they have changed), differential (which backs up all files modified since the last full backup), and incremental (which backs up only files that have changed since the last backup of any kind). Archives, on the other hand, contain static data, such as inactive document files and old e-mails.
The article suggests a move away from tape back up which has been the standard to disc back up using removable hard drives or off site back up using the Internet.

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1954183,00.asp

[Read more →]

Read the whole article here:  from PC Magazine: A Moving Target [1]

A Moving Target
Today, cell-phone viruses are not a big deal. But if you think your phone will always be safe, think again.
By Robert Lemos Security companies have warned of the risks of mobile-phone viruses for the past five years, ever since the mass-mailing computer virus Timofonica grabbed headlines as the first cell-phone virus (a misnomer, since it was a PC-based virus that sent text messages to phones as a side effect). Although there is real danger, few viruses have spread successfully on any mobile device—even fewer on popular cell phones—because infecting phones is not easy. Malicious programs cannot install themselves automatically on cell phones; users must allow them. For example, to be installed, Cabir requires a user to allow three different actions. Also, people rarely open attachments on cell phones, offering some protection against these early threats.

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1961558,00.asp

[Read more →]

The critical question, “Who owns the data?” the only acceptable answer is the dentist owns the data. However that also means the dentist must be able to exercise the usual functions of ownership. Only the dentist can decide who has access to the data. And the dentist can decide to take the data somewhere else at any time. And the data must be available in a readily transferable and accessible format, not a proprietary format only the Practice Management Program can use. Currently acceptable data base formats would be any fully relational data base such as SQL or Oracle. All the vendors will readily agree that the dentist owns the data, at the same time they often create obstacles in the form of proprietary file formats, (That’s the three or four letters after the period in a file name, such as .jpg for a photo) selected data base structures which don’t allow access to some data elements and data files which can not be identified with out using the original software. Any dentist who has tried to switch from one computer program to another knows it is difficult or impossible to get all the data transferred.

[Read more →]