The 90s called, and they want their external hard drives back. I am only half joking. In recent audits I have walked into practices that still rely on a single external hard drive for their backup, a method that fell out of serious use decades ago. If that is you, please read on, because your practice data deserves better.
Backup is one of those things that feels fine right up until the day it is not. So let me be blunt about why the external drive on the shelf is not the safety net you think it is, and what good backup actually looks like now.
The trouble with external hard drives
A single external drive has some real, fundamental weaknesses for a busy practice.
- They fail. Hard drives are mechanical and they wear out. The one holding your only backup is just as likely to die as the computer it is backing up, and often at the worst possible moment.
- The human bit gets forgotten. Rotating drives, swapping them, taking one home, it all depends on someone remembering to do it every day. People get busy. Weeks of "backups" turn out to be the same stale copy.
- You cannot see when it breaks. A drive quietly stops backing up and nobody knows, because there is nothing watching it from outside the practice. You only find out when you desperately need a restore that is not there.
- It is in the building. A drive left plugged in and sat next to the server is exposed to the very things backup is meant to protect you from: fire, theft, flood, and ransomware that simply encrypts the backup along with everything else.
- One copy, no history. If your only backup is overwritten with corrupted or encrypted data, there is nothing older to go back to.
None of this means the people running those practices are doing anything daft. It is just that the world moved on and the backup did not.
What good backup looks like now
Modern backup is built around a simple, proven idea often called 3-2-1: keep at least three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one copy held offsite. Here is how that comes together in a real practice.
A local NAS for fast restores
A network attached storage device sits on your network and takes regular, automatic backups. Because it is local, restores are quick, so if a single machine or a file goes wrong you are back to work in minutes rather than hours.
Image based backup so you recover the whole thing
The best backups are not just copies of files, they are full images of your systems. That means if a server fails or is hit by ransomware, we can restore the entire machine, settings and all, rather than rebuilding it from scratch and hoping you have every file. The real test of any backup is recovery, and image based backup is what gets you seeing patients again fastest.
Cloud backup for offsite safety and compliance
An automatic, encrypted copy held offsite in the cloud is what protects you when the building itself is the problem, whether that is a fire, a theft, or a flood. It also matters for compliance: NHS dental practices complete the Data Security and Protection Toolkit each year, and being able to show that your data is backed up offsite and genuinely recoverable sits right at the heart of it.
Immutable backups and real monitoring
We use immutable backups, which cannot be altered or deleted once written, so ransomware cannot quietly encrypt or wipe them. And everything is monitored, so if a backup fails we are alerted and fix it, rather than you finding out the hard way. You can see how this fits with the rest of your defences on our cybersecurity page.
It is about getting back to work
The point of all of this is not to collect copies of files. It is to answer one question honestly: if the worst happens this afternoon, how quickly can your practice be running again? An external drive on a shelf gives a very uncomfortable answer. A local NAS, image based backup and monitored offsite cloud copies give a much better one.
Join the 21st century
If you are still backing up to an external hard drive, please do not wait for the day it lets you down. Take a look at how we approach backup for dental practices, or simply give us a ring and we will review what you have today and tell you honestly where the gaps are. No drama, just a proper safety net.