Backup Data

Backups

The data you hold on the platform is held as two separate items:

• a collection of uploaded documents, e.g. PDFs, Word documents, images etc, that you have uploaded against client, staff and volunteer records etc
• an SQL database that stores everything else - essentially everything you have typed into the system

A backup option is provided for each.

Automatic Backup

Both the documents and the SQL database are backed up automatically. It does not required any configuration and is run overnight, 7 days a week. Each backup file is kept for 28 days. Please note that this retention period is fixed and needs to be considered for your privacy policy.

Manual Backup

We recommend that you do manual backups in line with your internal IT policies. Remember the frequency with which you take backups is also the amount of data you could lose in a catastrophic event, e.g. if you backup once a week, restoring from that backup would meaning losing up to a week's worth of data. Many of our client choose to backup daily.

The manual backup functions both as the "backup of last resort" and also your means of getting all your data from the platform if you move to another provider. We don't charge you to provide your with your own data at the end of the contract - you can simply download it yourself at any time during your contract.

Uploaded Documents

This option will download your uploaded documents as a zipped folder.

You can also filter the documents to be downloaded by:

• Date of upload/amendment. This is useful for partial backups to save time if you have a lot of documents. Some clients take a partial backup daily, then a full one weekly.
• Person who uploaded
• Category

SQL Data

Your recent automatically-created backups are available to simply download. Each is shown with the time it was taken. You can also generate and download a new backup, which typically takes a few minutes longer.

This option will create a single (compressed) SQL file containing your database data.

Note that data will be visible as plain text in this file. Store data securely.

Restoration

Restoration is designed for disaster recovery situations (total loss of the data), where the complete database is restored to a former state. Partial recovery, for instance where a user has accidentally deleted something, is a chargeable service, done at the discretion of the data team. This typically takes several days.