The Difference Between Having a Backup and Being Able to Recover
One of the most common answers we hear when we ask about backups is:
“We have backups.”
And that’s good.
The problem is that having backups and being able to recover from them are not the same thing.
Most veterinary practices don’t spend a lot of time thinking about backups, and that’s understandable. If everything is working, there usually isn’t a reason to.
The problem is that most backup strategies aren’t truly evaluated until something goes seriously wrong.
That’s when the difference between having backups and having a recovery plan becomes obvious.
File Backups and Disaster Recovery Are Different Things
Several years ago, we were called to help a veterinary practice that was experiencing a major outage.
Like many practices, they were running most of their operations from a single server. That server handled a little bit of everything including practice management software, file storage, user logins, time clock services, accounting services, and several other critical systems.
We discovered the server had suffered a hardware failure and could not be recovered.
The practice had backups, but they were file-level backups.
We could recover documents and data files, but we couldn’t simply restore the server and turn everything back on.
User accounts had to be rebuilt.
Applications had to be reinstalled.
Databases had to be restored and tested.
Services had to be reconfigured.
We worked around the clock to recover the environment, but it still took nearly a week before everything was fully operational again.
The backups did exactly what they were designed to do.
The problem was that they were designed to recover files, not recover the practice.
Recovery Time Matters
When most people think about backups, they’re thinking about data loss.
That’s important, but downtime matters too.
A practice can survive losing a document.
It’s much harder to operate when scheduling, medical records, imaging, prescriptions, reporting, and authentication services are unavailable.
The question isn’t simply whether your data can be recovered.
The question is how quickly you can get back to seeing patients.
The Right Backup Strategy Changes the Outcome
If that same practice had been using image-based backups with a local disaster recovery appliance, the outcome would have been very different.
Instead of rebuilding servers, reinstalling software, and restoring services one piece at a time, we could have started a virtual copy of the failed server directly from the backup appliance and had the practice operating again in a matter of minutes.
The data would have been the same.
The difference would have been recovery time.
That’s why it’s important to understand not only what is being backed up, but how those backups would be used during an actual failure.
Backups Should Be Tested
This is another area that often gets overlooked.
Most backup systems generate reports.
Most backup systems can tell you whether a backup job completed successfully.
Neither of those things guarantees that a recovery will work.
The only way to know that a backup is usable is to test it.
That doesn’t necessarily mean performing a full disaster recovery exercise every month.
It can be as simple as restoring a file, recovering a folder, mounting a system image, or verifying that a server can actually be recovered from backup.
The goal is not to create additional work.
The goal is to avoid discovering a problem during an emergency.
A Few Questions Worth Asking
You don’t need to know every technical detail, but someone should be able to answer these questions:
- What exactly are we backing up?
- Are we backing up files or entire systems?
- How long would it take us to recover from a server failure?
- When was the last restore test performed?
- How much downtime should we expect after a major failure?
Those answers tell you far more than a report that simply says “backup completed successfully.”
The Goal Isn’t Backups for the Sake of Backups
The goal is recovery.
Most practice owners don’t care how backup software works, and honestly, they shouldn’t have to.
What matters is knowing that if something goes wrong, the practice can continue operating and patient care can continue with as little disruption as possible.
That’s what a backup strategy is supposed to accomplish.
Questions About Your Own Practice’s Technology?
If you’d like a straightforward answer about backups, cybersecurity, practice management software, or technology planning, we’re always happy to have the conversation.