It goes without saying that even in the cloud, backups of SaaS applications with all its data must be continuously must be created on a daily basis. After all, you don't want to lose any data and - should something be accidentally deleted - you can restore it from the backup, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
Incidents vs. Desaster
It is clear to those responsible for operating an application, that they must be prepared for the worst case scenarios. Damage to the hardware due to water or fire must not lead to the loss of data that has been dearly acquired and paid for. This is certainly clear to everyone, and everyone is more or less well prepared for this (keyword "disaster recovery"). But what happens if individual projects or archive data are accidentally deleted? This can happen in hectic everyday life and even experienced administrators are not immune to such mistakes. Furthermore, it can happen that data transmitted via interfaces is faulty and, for example, causes deletions or changes to data that is still needed or should never have been deleted in the first place.
At the latest when such a case occurs and archive data and/or projects are accidentally deleted, it becomes clear whether the application in use was evaluated carefully. Many applications only offer the restoration of the entire system or the laborious, time-consuming and often expensive restoration of individual files from the backup. Projects with all their data, approvals and comments are lost in such a case.
The reason is clear. The system is designed for overall recovery in the event of a disaster, but not for the recovery of data in the event of individual deletions of projects and archive data.
Disaster due to lack of recovery functions
When restoring an entire system, all the work of the users, including permissions granted, comments, and other data inputs made since the time of the backup being restored, is completely lost. You are then faced with the choice of either losing everything done between the deletion and the restoration or expensively recreating the data from scratch and starting the entire process over. Therefore, due to the absence of a recovery function for individual elements such as projects or archive data, there is literally only "the choice between a rock and a hard place."
The solution are applications with recovery functions of deleted elements
Considering the significant loss of working hours and the enormous effort required when you have to restore the entire system with every deletion of individual projects and data, or the losses incurred when you can't recover the deleted elements because it's not worthwhile to roll back to a few days ago, the advantage of a system that allows for the individual reversal of deletions of entire projects and their files becomes evident.
Admittedly, developing such features is quite labor-intensive for system manufacturers and requires a substantial effort in both production and maintenance. However, even a significant incident can result in a huge cost difference for customers, which can far exceed the annual system costs.
At Artensis, we are continually surprised by the use of applications that do not allow the recovery of deleted projects and their associated data (at least for a certain period) and only rely on backup cycles.
In Artensis' PAS applications, it is always possible to trace what has been deleted. The restoration of projects, archive jobs, and all associated data is a standard feature in all PAS editions. Optionally, projects, archive jobs, and all related data can be restored with just a few mouse clicks within a range of 90 to 365 days.
Although such restoration features have rarely played a significant role in our customers' evaluations thus far, we consistently witness the great relief experienced by users, system administrators, and IT managers when we demonstrate how they can trace precisely what has been changed or deleted in the PAS application logs and how to easily recover accidentally deleted data with a few mouse clicks.