Maintaining Appointments

Make sure that in Appointments – Maintenance – System Constants, the backup facility is switched on. You need to do this AT EACH WORKSTATION WHERE THE BACKUP IS TO OCCUR, AND THE WORKSTATION NEEDS TO BE RUNNING IN ORDER TO TAKE THE BACKUP.

The recommendation is two workstations – the one used for regular appointments in Reception: check the box From this workstation; set to backup every five minutes, type 2 in Backup days after today (ie today and tomorrow). On a second workstation, perhaps the practice manager's, check the box From this workstation; set to backup every 30 minutes, type 15 in Backup days after today (ie today's and next 15 days' appointments).

In both, leave the file name as c:\appt_bak.txt. Of course if your whole system is down, you won't be able to print this file until up and running again. When you can print the appointment list, go to a text editor such as Write or Wordpad (it may be too big for Notepad), open the file and select c:\appt_bak.txt. It is advisable to change the font to a non-proportional one, such as Courier, as this makes the tabulation of the appointment list clearer.