Dr Harry Brown wrote:
> Hi
>
> This week again our computer system went down for two days and since
> almost everything is being done on the computer, it caused chaos. Now
> we are revamping our computer system and we will have some spare PCs
> left, one idea is to have a stand alone PC which will accept that
> backups from our main system. This will give us some protection
> against the risk of the main system going done and we can access some
> data, though it won't be on a network. Equally it will allow us to
> test the integrity of our backups of the main system. Has anyone else
> done this? Is there a better solution? Any pitfalls?
>
> Thanks
>
> Harry
>
> Dr Harry Brown GP Leeds
Harry,
Our clinical server has RAID 1 removable discs and a twin power supply.
This protects us against the failure of a hard disc - we just hot-swap
the faulty disc - and against the failure of a power supply.
We also have a second server running SQL Server to which the clinical
server makes hourly backups, and which copies these backups into its own
SQL Server database shortly afterwards.
Our client PCs have the standard icons to access the clinical server,
but if this server goes down we simply click on alternative icons to
work from the failover server.
Our shared system printers are network printers, so they aren't
dependent on either of the servers.
So far, we haven't had to test this out in earnest, but we feel we've
done what we can to avoid the worst-case scenario. We could lose an
hour's work in the case of utter failure of our clinical server just
before the backup to the failover server was due.
__
Michael
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