Every service you rely on says it has backups. Very few say what that means, and fewer still have ever tried to use them. "We have backups" is a claim. "We restored last month's snapshot and opened a case from it" is proof. When your records are the thing at stake, ask for proof.
Four questions for any provider
- What exactly is backed up, and how often? The database and the files are usually separate systems with separate schedules. A nightly database backup with files on a different cadence means a restore that does not line up.
- Are encryption keys backed up with the data? A copy of encrypted files without the keys that open them is a copy of noise. If files are encrypted at rest — as they are in Herarx, with per-owner keys — the key material must be recoverable alongside them.
- When was a restore last tested, and how? Not "can we restore" but "did we, recently, and did a real record open end to end". The honest answer includes a date.
- What does a restore not undo? A deliberate permanent deletion should not come back from a backup; if it did, retention promises would be meaningless. Trash for thirty days is the undo; backups are for disasters.
Outages are not data loss
An outage is when you cannot reach your data for a while. Data loss is when nobody can, ever. They are different problems with different defences — monitoring and fast rollback for the first, backups and rehearsed restores for the second — and a provider who conflates them is telling you something.
The copy you should keep yourself
Some professions are required to hold an independent copy of their records. Some clients ask for one at the end of a matter. Everyone should have one regardless, because the one scenario no provider can protect you from is the provider itself.
Settings → Export packages everything you own — cases and records, files and their contents, contacts, your security settings and audit logs — as a ZIP, ready within minutes and downloadable for seven days. Take one at a sensible interval, store it somewhere you control, and treat it as an archive rather than something you work from. Settings → Import restores from that ZIP if you ever need it to: records already present are skipped, file contents are restored and re-encrypted.
A restore rehearsal for your own export
Once a year, open the ZIP. Find a closed case. Confirm its files open. If they do, you have recovery. If they do not, you have found out on a quiet afternoon instead of the day it mattered — which is the entire point of rehearsing.
