Monthly patient transfer from one Orthanc to another Orthanc, without network connection between them

General
1

Hi,

I have 2 different Orthancs running on 2 different Synology NAS systems. One is located at my clinic, the other at home. I want to have exact copies on both locations. They both use PostgreSQL database.

The way I do this, is to dump the postgres database on the work Synology using pgdump command, and also copy patient files from the storage area to a portable HDD using the rsync command form an SSH session. Then, at home, I restore the database, and copy the files to the Orthanc’s home storage folder. As rsync is used, only newer files are copied, so I don’t need to copy the entire storage folder (as long as I don’t delete the portable HDD of course). There is areound 1,8 Tb of patient data, created in the last 15 years.

This strategy works but every time I restore the database, the housekeeper plugin restarts, modifying each file. It takes around 1.5-2 weeks worth of constant disk activity to do the housekeeping tasks, as the previous housekeeping actions are not preserved when the database is recreated.

I want to be able to transfer patients each month, or at least once in every 3 months, but this is very difficult due to the constant need for housekeeping.

So, what are my options?

  1. Turn housekeeper off, so there is no need to reprocess (I use MicroDICOM to browse the patients and I didn’t really see any performance improvments with or without housekeeper, so I wonder if it is really required for my use case (I don’t use the web explorer plugin, so maybe housekeeping would have more impact on web APIs).

2)Find a way to activate Housekeeper on the work Synology (but this is an old Synology running Orthanc Beta native app, so it isn’t up to date, and there probably isn’t a housekeeper plugin for it) or remove the Orthanc beta app, update to DSM7, install a Docker container, run a modern Orthanc version there.

3)Find a way to force Orthanc to scan its storage folder and look for DICOM files that exist there but aren’t in its own database. ChatGPT made me believe that was really possible, that if I added the new files to the storage directory, Orthanc would automatically detect them and add to its database. Unfortunately, this seems to be a hallucination.

4)There seems to be a ImportDicomFiles.py script for transferring patients, but apparently onlw works for mySQL database, so not very useful here.

I am open to suggestions,

Thanks.

2

Hi,

You can simply disable the housekeeper at your home Orthanc.
And you should actually make sure you have the same configurations on both side wrt IngestTranscoding and ExtraMainDicomTags and of course alway make sure you run the same versions.

The housekeeper is only required when you change some specific configurations and if you WANT to reprocess all data. It should be disabled on 99.9% of the installations…

Best,

Alain.

1 Like
3

Hello @Drmaestro please disregard if this suggestion is too radical, but it sounds like your dual Orthanc setup is for the purposes of backing up patient data - maybe consider switching from local NAS storage to cloud storage and use Orthanc’s awesome object storage plug-ins (they wrote them for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud).