Secure backup for Chamilo LMS

At BeezNest, the security of your information is a top priority. We go to great lengths to provide information management systems with the highest levels of security.

To ensure this, our team includes a specialist in the ISO/IEC 27001:2014 standard, guaranteeing a minimum level of security for all aspects of information systems management. This standard covers, among other things, the availability of data, ensuring that your system’s data remains accessible at all times — even in the event of unexpected incidents.

In situations where a system without a backup solution (due to budget constraints) might be compromised by a security breach, our backup service allows you to fully restore the system to a previous state.

Because we value clarity and transparency in the management of your data, we have detailed below our backup processes, so you can clearly understand the level of protection we provide and how it benefits you over time.

Information Security at BeezNest

Backup Frequency

A backup is not the same as replication or redundancy. In other words, a backup is not generated every second, every minute, or even every hour (although in specific cases, and for limited periods of time, we have managed hourly backups when required).

Instead, we perform daily backups. This means that every night, when your application experiences less traffic, our backup servers connect to your server to create a copy of the relevant data. This is not a full copy of everything — only the essential data required to restore and run the application seamlessly on another prepared server if necessary.

Retention

A backup has a specific useful life. When backups are created daily, we do not keep every single day indefinitely; instead, each backup is retained for a limited period. To understand the general logic of our retention schedule, it can be helpful to think of it as a calendar:

  • We keep daily backups for the last 7 days.

  • After 7 days, we retain only the last backup of each week (usually taken during the night from Saturday to Sunday) for the following 3 weeks.

  • After these 3 weeks, we keep only the last backup of the month (based on the weekly backup).

  • Each monthly backup is retained for 3 months (i.e., 3 monthly backups) before being permanently deleted.

Any backup older than 7 days that is not the last of the week is completely removed from our servers, leaving no trace. This means that it may not always be possible to recover a backup from a specific day (if it is older than a week), but typically a backup from a few days earlier or later will be available.

Geographic Independence

Our backup center is located in Belgium, within a data center owned and managed by BeezNest, separate from the servers hosting your application. This ensures a very low risk of data loss, even in the event of a catastrophic disaster or extreme scenario.

Data Security

Our backup servers connect to your server via SSH protocol, using SSL-based encryption. We regularly update our systems to maintain a very high level of data confidentiality during transfer over the internet.

Access to the backup servers is strictly limited to our senior administrators, further ensuring confidentiality. The servers are protected by simple yet proven security measures, including limiting open ports to only those strictly necessary, as these servers are dedicated exclusively to backup operations.

Backup Recovery Time

The backup recovery process is separate from the backup service itself, as it involves multiple areas of expertise, including support teams, system administration, and development. Therefore, an active support service with us is required to handle any backup restoration requests. The time needed to restore an application depends on various factors, including the total storage space used.

For example, if your server is not hosted with us, the restoration process may take longer due to coordination with your hosting provider or IT team, as well as data transfer time.

Backup recovery can also be affected by external factors beyond our control.

Additionally, the type of restoration requested (see the following section) can significantly impact the time required to complete the process.

Full vs. Partial Backup Restoration

Our backups are taken in their entirety, meaning they do not differentiate between specific parts of the application. For example, if you are using a Drupal site and request the restoration of a specific page, this process may take significantly longer than a full system restoration. This is because the page may have been replaced by another that cannot be removed, or it may contain numerous dependencies on other pages that were also deleted when the main page was removed.

Similarly, if you are using Chamilo or Skillms, restoring a specific course can take much longer than restoring the entire system due to other changes that occurred in the system after the course data was lost.