Editor’s Note Carol Murphy, Executive Editor

It’s late. I’m past our editorial deadline. Why? Because I’ve been ‘goofing off’ again. I’ve been working throughout the month to fine-tune our editorial presentation for this issue but I’ve taken a few too many ‘breaks’ to visit the DentalTown message boards. In reality, it’s not really neglecting my job–it’s just that our printer doesn’t really understand when I tell him I spent hours reading the latest posts on our DentalTown website and he’ll have to wait a few hours.

I’m not the only one that gets side-lined reading this information. I see posts from dentists as late as 2am saying they better ‘sneak’ into bed before their spouse discovers they are still on the computer. Needless to say, the boards are extremely addictive and the information fascinating.

Where else in the dental industry can you exchange ideas with dental colleagues around the world? Last evening, I became completely engrossed in a topic on body piercing and personnel policies. I’m telling you, it was more interesting than any magazine cover at the supermarket checkout. Such emotionalism! What would you do if your star assistant of many years came to work one day with a tongue piercing? Would you fire her? Would you relegate her to catching up on paperwork? I’m not going to delve into the myriad of answers to these questions. You’ll just have to visit the boards at www.dentaltown.com and see for yourself.

I will however share with you an extremely useful tip I saw a few days ago concerning data backups. If you aren’t backing up your practice’s data each night–START NOW! And more importantly, make sure the backup is working. Ask Howard, when he’s in a very good mood, what happened at his Today’s Dental practice a few years ago as a result of an inefficient backup.


Here’s the tip from a Townie in Tallahassee Florida, Robert S. Murrell, DMD: “At the end of the day we copy the entire SoftDent directory to one of our workstations. This takes about 4-5 minutes. Then we back up all of our *.dat, *.idx and *.sys files onto a Zip 250 disk. Every night one of my receptionists places this in her purse so that we have a copy of our critical files off site. What is great about transferring the entire SoftDent directory to a workstation is if for some reason we need to check something from the previous day, all we need to do is locate the sdwin.exe file, click on it and we have a fully operational SoftDent running with yesterday's data on it. There is no need to restore any files. Secondly if, God forbid, my server went down, all I have to do is share this drive and map it from all of the workstations and I'm up and running again.”

See...didn’t I tell you the information was great! That’s just a tiny fraction of professional ‘real world’ tips you can get every single day at www.dentaltown.com. And, by the time you’re reading this, our newly designed website will be up and running with classified ads, dental events, and the latest news to accompany the awesome information exchange on the message boards.

Just in case you can’t wrangle some ‘computer time’ at home from the kids, we have included some extremely good Townie posts this month throughout the magazine. I look forward to seeing you online soon!

Carol