Practitioner Tools: Backup Strategies to Save Your Practice

If you’re running a mental health practice of any kind, taking responsibility for ’security’ doesn’t just mean taking care to use the right encryption software, or remembering to lock the doors at night. It also means putting in place a reliable backup strategy that can replace data that would otherwise be lost in the event of serious computer failure. It means having systems already in place — before a problem ever arises — so that you can get back up and running quickly and be able to contact clients, keep financial data, and run other aspects of your practice which rely on computers.

For most of us, though, backups are about as exciting as watching paint dry, and unfortunately it’s that very mind-numbingly boring quality which means that all too often, backups just don’t get done at all.

But two new articles in our Build Your Practice section can help you formulate a strategy for making sure your backups just happen, automatically, with little or no effort on your part. Our Case Study in Backup Strategy offers some specific examples of how to automate the whole backup process, including full and incremental backups of your crucial practice data and your operating system itself. A separate introduction to the Basics of Backup explains some of the fundamental choices regarding what, where and how to backup — and why keeping good backups is vastly preferable to relying on dumb luck and data recovery services.

Have a look at both, and you’ll have a good idea of what kind of strategy you may be able to put in place today to protect your practice against catastrophic data loss. If you already have a good backup strategy in place, you might still find an idea or two that will be useful — like a money-saving tip on how to store encrypted backups remotely via the internet without paying the hefty fees charged by dedicated remote backup services.