Backing Up and Restoring College Office Data

ABOUT -> Security -> Restoring College Office data

Backing up your data:

We do a nightly backup of the data of all our customers, including the files and documents uploaded into College Office, and keep a copy of each backup for at least 30 days.
We also perform a daily backup of your data without the documents & files you upload into College Office. This backup is then compressed and encrypted (AES-256) using a password of your choice and can be downloaded from the My Institution page by any user with the Administrator role.
You can configure college Office to automatically upload your encrypted daily backup to a FTP or SFTP server of your choice. This feature is not available by default but must be requested. There is no charge to set it up but your FTP/SFTP solution must be fast enough to receive large files fairly quickly.

To configure the backup of your data click Setup on the lower right of the Home Page, then click My Institution and select the Custom tab. From this tab set the following fields (all under the Backup category):

Encryption Password: this is the password used to encrypt your backup. If you do not enter a password we will generate a random one for you the first time we run a backup.
You must keep a copy of the password used to encrypt your backup in a location accessible to you even if you can no longer connect to College Office!

Restoring your data:

Download a copy of your latest encrypted backup.
Using the 64-bits version of 7-Zip or WinZip, decompress the zip file: you will be prompted for your Encryption Password.
The decompressed file is a standard Microsoft SQL Server backup file which can be restored to any instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2022 or later (the restored backup gives you a fully structured relational database with primary keys and foreign keys.) You can download the free SQL Server Express edition from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads in order to view your data.

Notes:

This daily encrypted backup is provided to you as an insurance policy in case a catastrophic event would permanently prevent us from operating or you from accessing our system, or in case you may want to move your data to another provider (we will be glad to assist your new provider in importing your College Office data, but our standard hourly rate will apply.)
It is your responsibility to make sure that you are able to retrieve and decompress your backup: you should practice a disaster recovery exercise at least once a year.