How to do a Backup

[joeschneider]

how do I do a daily data backup to down to a USB Flash Drive??

[jdowner]

In order to make a simple backup of the CS PracticeWorks data to an external drive you just need to do a copy and paste of the data folder, or a minimum the .dat type files. You will want to make sure that all users are out of the software before making the backup in order to assure that all data files are copied without issue. 

We highly encourage a full backup of the entire data folder every backup, the only exception may be the PWimages folder inside the data folder, which contains files taken within imaging, the chart, and files uploaded to through the attachments feature.  The PWimages folder can be done as an incremental backup, only copying the new files since the last backup. 

Incremental style backups are discouraged when it comes to the rest of the data folder as restoring from an incremental back up has the high likely hood of corrupting the data due to the nature of the relationship based database structure.

[Leaha]

I am doing a full backup to a 6TB external drive. Could you please give me step by step instructions on how to do this as I have never ran a backup at all?

[jdowner]

Hello @Leaha 

If you plan to manually do a back up of your PracticeWorks data you would basically just need to make a copy of the entire pworks\data folder and paste it into your external drive.  You would want to make sure all users are out of PracticeWorks at the time you are making the backup. 

If you are using a backup software, our recommended backup method is to have it perform a full backup every time it runs a backup on the pworks\data folder.  We do not suggest using incremental backups as those are known to cause issues when restoring data if needed.