Just a few curious-type questions here. I’ve been using OpenEMR for about nine months ago and have had no problems (that weren’t caused by my own stupidity). The size of my emr_backup.tar files has slowly grown up to their current size of approximately 3GB. I have no idea whether or not this is typical. I note that almost 95% of the size is taken up by the openemr/sites/default/documents directory, which contains pdf’s of various scanned patient documents, so I really don’t see any way by which I might be able to make things smaller other than to either scan less or set my scanner to use a lower dpi resolution when it creates the pdf’s. What size backups have others been noticing, particularly those who have been utilizing the system for longer?
We’ve got 2,000 + patients, been running Oemr since March 2012, scanning
dozens of pages every day to patient records (300 dpi PDF’s) and we’ve just
recently broken the 1.2Gb mark. (tar+gpg encrypted)
Hope that helps.
Just a few curious-type questions here. I’ve been using OpenEMR for about
nine months ago and have had no problems (that weren’t caused by my own
stupidity). The size of my emr_backup.tar files has slowly grown up to
their current size of approximately 3GB. I have no idea whether or not this
is typical. I note that almost 95% of the size is taken up by the
openemr/sites/default/documents directory, which contains pdf’s of various
scanned patient documents, so I really don’t see any way by which I might
be able to make things smaller other than to either scan less or set my
scanner to use a lower dpi resolution when it creates the pdf’s. What size
backups have others been noticing, particularly those who have been
utilizing the system for longer?
It’s normal for the bulk of your backups to be documents, and at some point traditional backups will become impractical. I recommend reading this, especially if using a Linux server:
Thanks for the link. I think I can implement something like that relatively easily. With respect to size/volume, I’ve entered approx 1700 patients (some new, some existing, but that shouldn’t matter) into the system over the nine months I’ve used it. Most have several pdf’s, all at 300dpi. They can range from several kb to several hundred kb. A few are upwards of a megabyte.
We have clients that range from 7-10Gig with storage after 5 years (Small one Dr clinic) to 80Gig with documents after about the same time period (in this case its a OBGYN with large patient database.
The log table grows very fast and should be archived, reviewed and saved about every 3 months.
Yeah,
Go to administration/other/database.
Navigate to the log table in PHPMyadmin
Export the table using sql format (or don’t)
Do the same for log_comment_encrypt if you are encrypting your logs.
Now hit the “empty” button for each table, or use the “truncate” utility.
It will ask you “Do you really want to truncate table log?”
Say “Yes, pretty please do get rid of that crap.”
Do that for both tables…preferably with no-one using the system at the time.
Now go to xampp/apache/logs and xampp/php/logs. Open up those files, select all, then hit the [DEL] button, or just move them into storage, or just delete them outright.
You may have to shut down your services to do this last bit.
Once you are done with this, and the system is back up, you might want to clear the SMARTY cache (in the administration/other/calendar settings) as well. I recommend doing this before doing any major image backups anyway as the goofy names of the files in the smarty cache are not very well behaved on FAT32 media…and give trouble to some backup utilities.