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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.

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)

You should consult with your IT provider (or Far Edge Technology) to work out a backup plan which meets your budget and acceptable recovery risks. 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.

As part of installation, the Wise Owl Legal Helpdesk will sign off against your chosen backup strategy. If it does not meet our minimum requirements, you will be required to sign an additional waiver. 

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 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. 

We also recommend you purchase a single USB disk drive each year and make a complete copy of all data on your server to this disk. You then keep these disks in a secure location, away from your office.

This strategy can be implemented for under $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).

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

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.

We recommend every month you restore a copy of your SQL database and selected documents from your backups.

We recommend daily spot checks of your backups to ensure there are no errors listed and new records are appearing from each day.

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).

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

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. 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.

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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