How it works
How does backup and recovery work?
Records are backed up to an encrypted drive you keep off site. If a machine ever fails, you restore onto another one and are running again in minutes, and nobody who finds the drive can read a thing.
Encrypted off-site copy · running again in minutes
The backup is a locked, sealed copy under your control, not an account with an outside company.
Recovery is fast because the backup carries the whole sealed record, and the same sealed format is how a single-office deployment later grows onto a shared server.
A backup you hold, not an account you rent
A cloud backup is another copy of your government's records in a company's building, protected by that company's promises. An encrypted backup on a drive in your safe is protected by mathematics and by a key only you hold.
It is written encrypted, so it is safe to store anywhere your policy allows. A drive that is lost or stolen holds unreadable data, which turns a serious incident into an inconvenience.
What recovery actually involves
- What is backed up
- The complete sealed history, not just the current state of the files. You recover the proof along with the records.
- Where it lives
- A drive your government holds, kept wherever your own records policy says it belongs.
- If the drive is lost
- It reads as nothing without your keys. There is no personal information exposed.
- To recover
- Point a new machine at the backup, unlock it with your keys, and keep working. The history is intact and still provable.
- The same format grows
- The sealed archive that backs up one office is how that office later moves onto a shared server.
The drill worth running once
A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a plan. The single most valuable hour your IT can spend is restoring the backup onto a spare machine, in advance, while nothing is wrong.
It proves the encrypted copy is complete, that your keys are where you think they are, and that the people who would have to do it under pressure have already done it once calmly. We do this with you rather than leaving it as a line in a manual.
Backup, from each seat
Tribal IT
Recovery is a procedure you have rehearsed.
You hold the encrypted copy and the keys, and you have restored it once on purpose, so the day it matters is a procedure rather than a crisis.
Council
The government's history is not fragile.
A failed machine, a fire, or a theft does not cost the tribe its records, and the recovered history is still complete and still provable.
Staff
A bad day costs minutes, not years.
The work you did is on the backup with everything else. Restoring means you sit down at another machine and continue.
Questions tribes ask about backup
- How often should we back up?
- As often as the work is worth. Most offices settle on a daily encrypted copy with a second copy kept off site, and we set that cadence with your IT rather than picking one for you.
- Can we keep a copy in another building?
- Yes, and you should. The copy is encrypted, so a second location is a resilience decision rather than a security exposure.
- Does restoring lose the audit trail?
- No. The sealed history is part of what is backed up, so the restored system can still prove everything that happened before the failure.