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Backup and Archiving 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.

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).

We recommend you never permanently 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, 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.

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 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.

Hosted Databases

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

We maintain the following SQL server database backups:

  • Hourly backups of new or changed records (SQL Server log backups), retained for 7 days

  • Daily full database backups, retained for 45 days

  • Monthly full database backups, retained indefinitely

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.

Backups are stored in the following locations:

  • On the server your Wise Owl database is hosted on, in our secure North Sydney data centre

  • An on-site copy of all backups is made to an alternate server in our North Sydney data centre

  • An off-site copy of all backups is made to an alternate Sydney location

Documents and database records which are not purged are never deleted, they remain online in your Wise Owl database.

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 and we can restore a copy of individual documents at a point in time (we save several copies of both database and documents through the day).

The older the time requested, the less likely we can restore from a specific time. Over time, we remove different versions of files from your backups (eg: we might keep copies from every hour for 2 days, then copies every 6 hours for the next 14 days, then copies every day until backups finally deleted).

Backups older than 45 days may not be available.

Additional costs will apply to restore backups.

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