OpenEMR OpenEMR is the most popular open source electronic health records and medical practice management solution. OpenEMR's goal is a superior alternative to its proprietary counterparts with passionate volunteers and contributors dedicated to guarding OpenEMR's status as a free, open source software solution for medical practices with a commitment to openness, kindness and cooperation.. OpenEMR Standard is a HIPAA-eligible deployment for the Amazon Marketplace — consult the datasheet for further details.
- Access the OpenEMR container:
sudo -i -- sh -c 'docker exec -it $(docker ps | grep _openemr | cut -f 1 -d " ") /bin/sh' - Visit container volume:
docker volume ls,cd $(docker volume inspect <volume_name> | jq -r ".[0].Mountpoint")
Your RDS instance will take regular automated snapshots at the configured time of day, and encrypted backups of the OpenEMR filesystem and patient records are made via Duplicity to a stack-provided KMS-managed S3 bucket.
Because the database backup and document backup are separate processes, you may find the default times selected by Amazon unsuitable. You can adjust the daily database backup time through the AWS RDS control panels — Modify your database instance and select a time in GMT that you'd prefer — and you can establish a new crontab if the default timing of /etc/cron.daily/duplicity-backups isn't consistent.
Note that if you haven't taken these steps but you're running the backup process prior to either a test or a formal migration, you will want to trigger both a database snapshot (again in the RDS control panel) and run /etc/cron.daily/duplicity-backups on the OpenEMR instance as root to ensure mutually-consistent results.
Two restore procedures exist, an automated process using a CloudFormation recovery stack, and a more manual process requiring an administrator put the pieces together.
Download the automated stack recovery template and create a stack with it in AWS CloudFormation. You'll be answered many of the same questions you were asked when you created your original OpenEMR Standard deployment, but the third section has three new questions.
- Your KMS key's Amazon Resource Name is available from the IAM control panel, under Encryption Keys. Remember that an ARN starts with
arn:aws.... If you can't identify the key used by the stack you want to recover, check the Resources tab in CloudFormation for the OpenEMRKey entry. - Your RDS Snapshot is the copy of the database you want to restore. Find it in the RDS control panel, under Snapshots. This is an ARN, not a name, so click the snapshot to bring up the details.
- Your S3 Bucket is the bucket created for your backups and audit trail. You can find that under CloudFormation's Resources too. Do not provide an ARN here, only the name of the bucket.
With all the questions answered, click through to launch the recovery stack. Once the process has ended, your OpenEMR system will be operating in an entirely new VPC with newly allocated resources, without disturbing the original installation. This faculty can be used to recover from disaster (reassigning DNS to the new addresses as necessary), to migrate an instance between regions, or just as a monthly scheduled test of the recovery procedure.
- Before proceeding, we recommend you make sure to have full copies of all of the following:
- A full copy of the S3 bucket created by the stack.
- A full copy of both EBS volumes attached to the OpenEMR instance.
- A snapshot of the production database you are about to overwrite.
- Restore from the most recent Duplicity backup with
sudo /root/restore.sh. - Restore the most recent snapshot via the AWS console — make sure to restore the snapshot into the correct VPC and subnet — and update your OpenEMR configuration file (
sqlconf.php) with the endpoint of the new instance.