Backup Overview
To ensure that you are capable of restoring OSCAR you will need the following
- Your Mysql database - this is the most valuable and changing part of your data, and is your "chart" for practical purposes
- Your Oscar Documents which contains scanned documents, eForm templates, downloaded laboratory files, downloaded files from the ministry etc
Less important, but convenient to have is the Oscar configuration file
- this is static and so you don't need to re download it but contains a password and name for your database and lots of configurations about where files are located and how your install works for you. Also consider writing a copy of the exact Oscar.war (the Oscar program) file that matches your install as after the fact (and in a rush) it may be hard to remember which Oscar program version matches your Oscar Mysql database.
The rest of the OSCAR setup (Tomcat, MySQl, Drugref, Postgres, java, mule, hylafax....) is generic and does not need backing up.
You only need to backup once - about 5 minutes before your hardware explodes.
The backup will be usually no more than 1GB of drive space (uncompressed) per FTE per year which means most will be able to backup to optical media.
A common approach is to download the server's daily backup to another computer each day, and burn a disk of the entire weeks backups to CD/DVD and take it off site (protection from fire or theft). This can be as simple as putting the DVD into the doctors briefcase at the end of the week.
Two caveats
- If the data is not encrypted (depends on your setup) this is a very boring but embarrassing DVD, or desktop computer, to loose or have stolen.
- You do not know if your backup strategy works unless you try to restore your setup.
