MEDISOFT backups are an important component of a healthy practice, but not everyone gives enough thought to their backup process. Backups should be run at least daily. Think of it this way: if something happens to your data, how much work are you willing to lose? Restoring from last night’s backup means you won’t lose more than one day’s work, whereas if the most recent good backup you have is two months old, you’re going to have problems. Restoring from a recent backup and redoing a few hours or work is often more cost-effective than a repair of damaged / corrupt data, when that data can even be repaired.
Of course, a MEDISOFT backup can’t be run from the application if there is more than one user logged in to the system. Many practices will therefore run a backup first thing in the morning, or last thing at night, to ensure that no one else is in. If you try running a backup from a recent version of MEDISOFT (v18 and up), you may get a message saying that “A Medisoft backup is already in progress by [user]” even when you know that’s not true. There is a file called hotbackup.txt that sometimes gets created in the root of the medidata folder (on your server if you have Network Professional) during backups. While MEDISOFT normally deletes the file itself when the Medisoft backup is done, if this doesn’t happen, the system will think that there is a backup running currently and prevent you from running a new one.
To get around this issue, simply locate this hotbackup.txt file and delete it, and you will then be able to run the Medisoft backup. The video tutorial below will demonstrate how to do this.
If you are working with multiple practices, each practice will need to be backed up individually from MEDISOFT, with its own set of backup files. Also, consider rotating MEDISOFT backups to more than one device and taking backup drives outside the office, instead of keeping all your eggs in one basket. Of course, if a drive got lost or stolen and you happen to have 500 or more patients, this could be a HIPAA violation and lead to other headaches. We highly recommend automated cloud backups; the cloud backup is secure and HIPAA-complaint, and you never have to worry about running it manually or keeping a copy off-site. Contact us for more info!
