Backup and Archiving Recommendations

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.

(You may engage Far Edge Technology to provide a quote to configure and manage your backups)

Regular Testing

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 purge 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).

Hosted Databases

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

We maintain SQL server database backups for a minimum of 45 days, and then retain one full SQL database backup for every month.

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.

Documents and database records which are not purged are never deleted,

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.

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 keep copies from every hour for 7 days, then copies every 6 hours for the next 14 days, then copies every day until backups finally deleted).

Backups older than 45 may not be available.

Additional costs will apply to restore backups.