Backups
Patient data lives on your device, so the device is the only thing standing between you and a data loss event. HM Praxis ships with a scheduled local backup system to protect against that.
HM Praxis is local-first: nothing is automatically backed up to our servers. You must enable scheduled backups (or run manual ones) yourself to be protected.
Setting Up Scheduled Backups
Open Settings
From the sidebar, click the gear icon to open Settings, then choose the Backup & Restore tab.
Enable Automatic Backups
Toggle Enabled on. The schedule form below becomes active.
Automatic scheduled backups require Pro. The manual Back up now button works on every tier.
Pick a Destination Folder
Click Choose folder... and select where backups will be saved. A folder on an external drive or a cloud-synced folder (OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive) is ideal - that way a hardware failure does not take backups with it.
Set the Schedule
Choose:
- Frequency: daily, weekly, or monthly
- Hour and minute the backup runs (24-hour clock)
- Day of week (weekly schedules) or day of month (monthly)
- Retention count: how many old backups to keep before deleting
A daily schedule with a retention of 14 gives you two weeks of rolling recovery points and uses minimal disk space.
Test with "Back Up Now"
Click Back up now to run an immediate backup. The status panel shows the result. If the file lands in your destination folder, the schedule will work too.
What Is Inside a Backup
A backup is a compressed archive containing:
- The SQLite database (patients, appointments, records, billing, all of it)
- The local documents folder (uploaded consent forms, lab files, imaging)
- A manifest file with the backup's SHA-256 hash for integrity verification
Filenames include the timestamp so you can identify backups at a glance.
Verifying a Backup
In the backups list (below the schedule form), each row has a Verify button. Clicking it:
- Reads the backup file from disk
- Computes a SHA-256 hash of the contents
- Compares it to the hash in the manifest
- Reports a green check (match) or red cross (corruption detected)
Cloud sync can occasionally corrupt files in transit. Verifying gives you confidence the backup is restorable before you actually need it.
Restoring from a Backup
To restore from a backup file:
- Open Settings > Backup & Restore
- Find the backup in the list and click Restore
- Confirm in the dialog (this overwrites your current database)
- HM Praxis closes the database, swaps in the backup, and re-opens it
Restoring replaces your current database. Any work done since the backup was taken will be lost. Take a fresh manual backup first if you want to be able to undo the restore.
Retention Policy
The retention count is the maximum number of backup files HM Praxis keeps in your destination folder. When a new backup brings the count over the limit, the oldest file is automatically deleted.
- Set retention high enough to cover your worst-case recovery window
- Daily x 14 = 2 weeks of recovery, ~1 to 10 GB depending on documents
- Weekly x 12 = 3 months of recovery, lighter on disk
- Monthly x 12 = a year of monthly snapshots for compliance
Reading the Backup Status
The status panel above the backups list shows the last attempt's result with a color:
- Green: last backup succeeded
- Red: last backup failed (with the error message)
- Amber: a backup was skipped (for example, the destination folder was unreachable)
- Grey: no backup has run yet
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