A lightning storm in the middle of the night destroyed both servers of two competing practices that were across the street from one another. The practices used different approaches for backing up and protecting their data. 

The first practice used the DIY method, with external hard drives they swapped out and took home themselves. They pulled their hair out when they realized two weeks had passed since the drives had been swapped. A new was server was ordered, then they waited on shipment, configuration, and data restoration. The first practice was down for three days, and then had to re-enter two weeks worth of notes and charges. 

The second practice used a cloud based backup solution that included data restoration to a temporary cloud server. After the storm, they made a phone call to their IT company. They were back in business the same day with no data loss. 

Longterm effect: patients who couldn’t be seen during the outage lost confidence in the first practice, told all their friends, and moved their business across the street to the second practice, who forever more had an advantage.