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Last updated: November 1st, 2018
So far in these
security articles, we've discussed the measures we take to ensure that there is no
unauthorized access of your data. This article focuses on the opposite: ensuring that the data is always available
to you when you need it.
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Backups -
Aside from having your data stolen by a hacker, the worst thing that can happen with any CRM is for your
data to get deleted in an unrecoverable way. This is especially a risk if you store the data on your personal
computer rather than online. With Less Annoying CRM, you don't have to worry about that. We have four layers
of backups for you:
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When you delete a record in the CRM, our standard approach is to just "archive" it so that if you
need to recover it, it's just a matter of unarchiving it. This is the easiest way to recover data
in most situations.
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We keep a real-time backup of our main database, so that in the event that there's a site-wide problem
(like a bug in our code, or a server error) we can rollback to pretty much any moment in time over
the previous day.
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Every night we export a copy of the entire database. We save these nightly backups for the last 30 days,
and one per month for the last year. If something bad happens to your account (like if a
disgruntled employee tries to mess up all your data) and it can't be restored using the first option
for some reason, just contact us and we can restore your account to one of these nightly backups.
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In addition to keeping the nightly backups in our main data center, we also send copies of it to a
different Amazon data center on the other side of the U.S. in case some sort of major disaster hits
the main data center. To be extra careful, we also send a copy to be stored in Microsoft's cloud
storage so that even if all of Amazons hosting worldwide is completely destroyed somehow, we'll still
have backups. It would take some time to get the software up and running after an event like that,
but your data would be intact.
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(Bonus 5th option) Exporting - If you're really paranoid about only having your data in the cloud,
no problem. Just go to the export page in your settings section and you can download a complete list
of your contacts, notes, and files anytime you want. We also have the ability to save your pipeline
reports, and a print-out of your activity feed so you're welcome to take your own backups as often as
you want.
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Database failover -
In addition to having backups, our main database has an exact clone of itself that always stays up-to-date. This way
if our main database goes down for some reason (servers have weird glitches sometimes the same way normal computers do)
we can flip over to the clone without needing to wait for a fix to the main database. This limits the length
of downtime.
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Downtime monitoring -
Obviously our goal is to never have downtime, but a reality of technology is that sometimes it does experience
problems. We use a service called "Uptime Robot" which monitors our site and notifies us in the
the event of downtime so that we can fix it immediately. At the time of this writing, Uptime Robot reports that
we've had about 7.5 hours of downtime over the last year.
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Improvements on the way -
We're proud of how reliable Less Annoying CRM has been over the years, but as we grow, we're setting our
sights even higher. Our co-founder Bracken King leads "DevOps" which includes site reliability, and there
are a number of major improvements coming in the future. We're specifically calling this out because unlike
new features and other user-facing improvements, no one notices when site reliability gets better, but
it's still a very important thing to work on.
