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You should consult with your IT provider (or Far Edge Technology) to work out a backup plan which meets your budget and acceptable recovery raterisks. The more you spend, the more likely your backups will function correctly when you need them most. However, a reasonable backup strategy can be implemented with minimal cost.
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As a minimum, we recommend you purchase 3 external USB disk drives of 1TB minimum 500GB capacity (these cost approximately $100 ea from JB Hi-Fi, Office Works or computer retailers). Label the disks 1, 2 and 3. One disk should be attached to your server at all times, this will be saving backups during the day. One disk should be kept in your office in a secure location (eg: locked safe). One disk should be off-site (eg: at a trusted employee's house).The disks should be cycled on a daily basis: the disk attached to your server is moved to your office safe, the office safe disk is taken home by a trusted employee, and the trusted employee brings the disk from home and connects it to the server.
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This strategy can be implemented for about under $500 in the first year, and $100 each subsequent year. And is well worth the cost to ensure your electronic records are safe.
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Whenever you close and archive matters and files, we recommend you save a copy of all records and documents pertaining to the file on an external USB disk drive. This disk drive should be separate from your normal backup disks. All archives should be in the form of simple text files, PDF files and Word documents; they should be maintained in folders on the disk separately from your Wise Owl database (to provide an alternate way of recovering and accessing data).
Additional Backup Options
You may wish to consider the following additional options for backups:
- Off site backups to the cloud
- Far Edge Technology can offer space in its secure data center for storage of backups
- DropBox for Business
- OneDrive
- Google Drive
- CrashPlan
- BackBlaze
- Alternate mediums
- DVDs or other optical media
- Tape drives
- NAS server
- Additional or spare disks in case of failures
- Location of off-site backups and archives
Backup Software
The Wise Owl Legal Help Desk recommends using Shadow Protect for maximum data security, flexibility in choosing what to restore and cloud backup options. Additional fees apply.
The standard Windows Server backup and SQL Server backup program are available as part of your server installation. These do not require additional fees, but do not provide as many options to restore and can make cloud backups more difficult.
Regular Testing and Maintenance
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We recommend you never permanently purge erase any documents. When you purge documents from Wise Owl Legal, we recommend you copy them to an external USB hard disk AND file server. Your file server should maintain a copy of purged documents. The USB hard disk should be stored in a secure location as a secondary backup.
Due to the low cost of USB hard disks and NAS storage servers, we recommend records be kept permanently, rather than destroyed after the legal retention period. Only data legally required to be destroyed should be destroyed (and you should keep records of when this destruction occurred).
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Deleting means we place the record in a Deleted or Inactive status. The actual data is not removed or erased and can usually be restored by a simple action in Wise Owl Legal. In some unusual cases, the data may require manual intervention by the Wise Owl Helpdesk. In all cases, no data the permanently erased.
Purging or Erasing are used to mean the same thing. They imply mean permanent, irreversible data removal. When you Purge or Erase in Wise Owl, the record or document is gone. There is no undo function within Wise Owl Legal itself. If you find you accidentally purged or erased a record or document, you must restore the data from your backups. There is no alternative. You may incur additional costs restoring data in this case.
Any time when data is permanently purged or erased, there will be a confirmation prompt in red text and requiring you to tick a check box to actual complete the purge. Your action to purge will be recorded in the Wise Owl Legal audit log with your name, date and time against it.
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We maintain SQL server database backups for a minimum of 45 days, and then retain one full SQL database backup for every month. The monthly full backups are never deleted.
We maintain documents backups for a minimum of 45 days, but do not retain long term archives of purged documents. It is your responsibility to archive documents before purging them.
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