The day the practice computer would not start again

On a Tuesday morning, the reception computer shows a black screen. The technician spends the afternoon on it, returns the next day, then announces that the drive is dead. On that drive: every patient record in the practice, ongoing treatment plans, X-rays, and the payment ledger.

This is not an exceptional scenario. It is the predictable consequence of a way of selling dental software that still dominates the Algerian market.

Why this is structural, not bad luck

Most dental software sold in Algeria is single-computer software: the application is installed on one machine, and the database lives on that same machine. The commercial model that comes with it is a one-time payment: you pay once, usually between 17,000 and 21,000 dinars depending on the offer, and the product is yours.

That model has a consequence that is rarely explained at the time of purchase: after the sale, nobody remains responsible for your data.

There is no automatic backup, because backup requires infrastructure that someone must maintain. There are no updates, because the seller has no recurring income to fund maintenance. There is no recourse, because the commercial relationship ended on installation day.

The hard drive, however, has a limited lifespan. Three to five years on average, and less in a room where the computer stays on all day, power cuts are frequent, and air conditioning is unreliable. Failure is not an accident. It is a deadline.

What exactly disappears

When people talk about data loss in a dental practice, they first think of patient contact details. That is the easiest part to rebuild: patients have a phone, and they will come back.

What cannot be rebuilt:

• The clinical history. Which tooth was treated, when, how, and by whom. A patient who returns five years later with pain in a previously root-treated tooth 26 becomes a patient you are meeting from scratch.
• Ongoing treatment plans. Patients halfway through a rehabilitation, those who accepted a quote, those who were meant to return in September. These are treatments that were started and never completed, and revenue that will never come in.
• The true financial position. Who paid what, who made a deposit, who still owes a balance. Without that record, every unpaid balance becomes impossible to recover in practice: you cannot claim an amount that you can no longer substantiate.
• Images. X-rays, before-and-after photographs, digital impressions. You can take another X-ray; you cannot recreate an X-ray from three years ago.

The question is not whether a drive will fail. It is what will be stored on it when that day comes.

The three false solutions

“I have a USB drive”

A USB drive is plugged in at the end of the week, whenever someone remembers. The problem is not the drive. It is consistency: a backup made whenever there is time will be several weeks old on the day it is needed. And a drive kept in a practice drawer disappears with the practice in a theft, fire, or flood.

“I have an external hard drive”

That is better, but it has the same consistency problem and adds another one: nobody ever checks whether the backup can actually be restored. A corrupted copy looks exactly like a valid copy until someone tries to open it. Many practices discover on the day of a failure that their backup drive has contained an empty folder for eight months.

“My IT technician handles it”

Sometimes that is true. Often, the technician installed the software four years ago and never came back. There is only one way to know: ask them to restore the backup from two days ago onto another machine, in front of you.

The three requirements of a real answer

A serious backup system meets three conditions together. Two out of three is not enough.

1. Automatic. No human action should be required. Anything that relies on someone remembering will eventually stop being done.

2. Outside the practice. The copy must be physically stored elsewhere. A backup that burns with the premises is not a backup.

3. Actually restored at least once. A backup that has never been restored is an assumption, not a guarantee. The test must be performed on a different machine from the original.

Those three conditions need a fourth for health data: the copy must be encrypted. A backup of medical records travelling unencrypted on an external drive is a confidentiality problem, not a solution.

What we chose at Donto

Donto is a Dental OS, the operating system for a dental practice. Data does not live on the reception computer: it is backed up automatically, outside the practice, and restoration is tested.

Most importantly, it is end-to-end encrypted. Patient records are encrypted on your device before they are transmitted, using keys we do not hold. Even we at Donto cannot read them. This is not a moral commitment; it is an architectural constraint. We have made access technically impossible for ourselves.

For practices that prefer to keep their data physically on their premises, Donto can also run as a local installation, with the same backup discipline.

The test to run tomorrow morning

You do not need to change software to understand your current position. Three questions, ten minutes:

1. Where is the latest copy of my patient database, and exactly when was it made? If the answer is not a precise date, there is no backup.
2. Is that copy stored somewhere other than the practice? If it is in a desk drawer, it protects only against drive failure, not everything else.
3. Has anyone ever restored that copy onto another machine? If the answer is no, you do not know whether it works.

Three “yes” answers: your practice is covered. One “no” is enough to show what needs attention this week, which is already far better than finding out on a Tuesday morning in front of a black screen.