WayCool uses multiple layers of redundancy, backups, and audit history to protect customer data and support recovery when something goes wrong.
Our data center keeps one primary version of the database along with two secondary replicas that are kept in sync. These replicas help protect against a local emergency or hardware failure.
Microsoft manages this configuration to help ensure high reliability. The secondary replicas are also used for reporting and other high read-only workloads, which improves performance in addition to providing redundancy.
Replicas are designed primarily for availability and protection from local infrastructure failures. They are different from backups, which provide restore points over time.
Backups are used for disaster-recovery situations—for example, if a major event affects the data centers where data is stored and the database must be restored. This includes major natural disasters affecting a data center.
Maintaining backups for recovery is also a requirement for HIPAA compliance.
Backups provide critical restore points over time. Our retention schedule includes:
• 35-day point-in-time backups: Backups are timestamped to the millisecond, allowing restoration to any point in time during the previous 35 days. These are the first line of backup support for common issues that require specific data to be reloaded.
• Weekly backups: We retain the first day of every week for five weeks.
• Monthly backups: We retain monthly backups for six months.
• Yearly backups: We retain yearly backups for ten years.
The audit log is our strongest defense when data has been deleted or changed. We retain all audit-log data indefinitely, and some of that history is available to users in the History tab.
Because we store a large volume of history, audit-log data is kept in optimized long-term storage designed to retain hundreds of millions of rows for our customers. Think of the audit log like a check ledger: it records what happens to the data in the database.
This lets us investigate what happened and, in many cases, use the history to rebuild data. The main challenge is narrowing the investigation to the exact time and records involved.
WayCool has tools to restore data and investigate its history at different points in time. Backups are an important part of that process, but they are only one part of the overall protection strategy. Replicas support availability and redundancy, while the audit log provides detailed history that can help us understand and rebuild changes.
Depending on the issue, restoring or rebuilding data may take time while we identify the exact records and point in time involved.
