Backup and Archiving

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Data

Your Wise Owl Legal database contains important legal documents and financial records in electronic form. It is of critical importance that you maintain regular backups to ensure you do not lose data in the event of a server crash, data corruption or theft.

Backups from Your Server

If you are running your Wise Owl Legal database on your own server, you are responsible for maintaining and testing your own backups.

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The Wise Owl Legal Helpdesk can assist restoring from backups, but cannot guarantee successful data recovery unless it (or one of its approved partners) are maintaining your backups. Additional fees may apply.

Minimal Backup Strategy

As a minimum, we recommend you purchase 3 external USB disk drives of 1TB 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 $500 in the first year, and $100 each subsequent year. And is well worth the cost to ensure your electronic records are safe.

Minimal Archive Strategy

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).

Regular Testing and Maintenance

It is critical to regularly test and monitor your backups. This ensures your backups are still functioning correctly and you are familiar with the process required to restore data in an emergency situation.

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Failure to monitor and test backups is a leading cause of data loss. That is, your backups may not have been working for days or months and you are totally unaware of it. Only when you need to recover data from them do you realise they are broken.

Archiving of Documents

We recommend archiving all information regarding a file or matter when it is closed and archived to an external USB hard disk AND file server. Your file server should maintain a copy of all documents and records pertaining to a file or matter in case they are required at some point in the future. All archives should be in the form of simple text files, PDF files and Word documents; they should be maintained separately from your Wise Owl database (to provide an alternate way of recovering data).

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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).

Purging and Erasing vs Deleting

In Wise Owl Legal, we maintain a distinction between Deleting and Erasing or Purging.

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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. Your action to purge will be recorded in the Wise Owl Legal audit log with your name, date and time against it.

Hosted Databases

If you have hosted your Wise Owl Legal database in our secure data centre, we maintain backups on your behalf.

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We provide no guarantee that accidental purges of data can be restored. You must save your own copies of documents you wish to purge as your own archive.

Restoring from Hosted Backups

You may request we restore from a backup at any time. We can restore a copy of your SQL database and documents at a point in time (we save copies once per hour). We can restore a copy of individual documents at a point in time.

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