Backup and recovery policy

• Every night: a consistent dump of the production database, every stored file (uploaded documents, signed PDFs, company logos) and the application configuration. Saved quote PDFs are in the database.
• Backups are encrypted with AES-256 on our server before they are stored, in an encrypted repository on our server. The encryption key is kept in a file readable only by the administrator account.
• Before every production release: an additional full database dump and copy of the application, restore-tested as described below.

We keep 7 daily, 4 weekly and 6 monthly backups. Older nightly backups are removed automatically.

Every week an automated test restores the newest backup into a temporary folder and loads the database into a separate test database. It compares the number of companies, users, submissions and access-log entries with the counts recorded when the backup was made, checks the checksum of every restored file, confirms the configuration (including the data encryption key) is present and runs an integrity check of the backup repository. The test database is emptied afterwards.

Every production release also restores its pre-release backup into the test database and stops if record counts differ.

If a nightly backup or a weekly restore test fails, or the newest backup is more than a day old, an email goes to TitleMagic’s owner.

Sensitive fields are encrypted in the database before they are stored, and the backups themselves are encrypted as well.

• A release that fails to build or fails its post-release checks is rolled back automatically to the previous build.
• Restoring the database from a backup discards data created after the backup (up to about a day), so it is done only with approval from TitleMagic’s owner.

When data is deleted under a retention rule or at the end of a subscription, it is deleted from the live system. Backups are not edited: deleted data ages out of the nightly backups within six months. Pre-release backups taken earlier are kept as they were taken.