Backups & Disaster Recovery

Freedam automatically and continuously protects your entire workspace — every asset, every setting, every piece of metadata — without any action required from you. This page explains, in plain terms, what is protected, how often, and what happens in the rare event that a restore is ever needed.

This is background information for administrators who want to understand the safety net under their data (for example, before signing off on a compliance questionnaire or reassuring a stakeholder). There is nothing to configure here — backups run automatically for every workspace.

The short version

Your files and your database are backed up every night.
A complete copy of your entire workspace is taken every week.
Every backup is stored off-site, on different infrastructure than the one running your workspace, so a problem with the primary servers can't take the backups down with it.
Restores are tested weekly against a real copy of the system, not just assumed to work.

What is protected

Everything that makes up your workspace is covered:

Every original file and every generated preview/thumbnail
Your asset metadata, tags, collections, and vocabulary values
Templates, form definitions, and automation rules
Branding, watermarks, and dashboard configuration
User accounts, roles, and permission settings

Nothing needs to be selected or turned on — the protection applies to the workspace as a whole, automatically.

How often backups run

Freedam layers three kinds of backups, each running on its own schedule:

What	How often	Why
Database snapshot	Every night	Captures every metadata change, setting, and record from the day
File copy	Every night	Keeps an independent, up-to-date copy of every asset file
Full workspace snapshot	Once a week	A complete, self-contained copy of the whole workspace — files, database, and settings together — that can rebuild everything from scratch

Because of this nightly cadence, in the worst case, less than a day's worth of activity is ever at risk — what's known as the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and Freedam's is 24 hours.

Where backups are stored

Backups are kept in a separate storage location, on different infrastructure from the servers that run your day-to-day workspace. That separation is intentional: if the primary servers ever had a serious problem — hardware failure, a botched update, anything — the backups are unaffected because they don't share the same physical infrastructure.

How restoring works

If a full restore is ever needed, Freedam rebuilds the entire workspace — files, database, and settings — from the most recent complete weekly snapshot, then replays the nightly changes on top of it so nothing since is lost.

While a restore is running, the workspace is temporarily placed into maintenance mode: users see a short, friendly maintenance page instead of the app, so nobody works against data that's mid-repair. Once the restore finishes and is verified, the workspace comes back online automatically.

The target for how long this whole process takes — from "something went wrong" to "workspace fully back online" — is what's known as the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Freedam's target is 4 hours or less.

How we know restores actually work

A backup you've never tested is just a hope. Every week, Freedam automatically runs a real, complete restore against a dedicated test workspace and checks that it comes back online correctly. If that automated check ever fails, it alerts the team immediately — so restore reliability isn't just designed in, it's verified continuously.

What backups do not cover

Everyday accidental deletions are handled separately by the Trash feature, which keeps deleted assets recoverable for 30 days without needing a full restore. Backups exist for larger-scale problems (server failure, corruption, catastrophic mistakes), not day-to-day undo.
Backups protect data that has already been saved. Anything mid-upload or mid-edit at the exact moment of an incident is subject to the same 24-hour RPO as everything else.

Good to know

There is nothing to schedule, enable, or configure — this protection is always on for every workspace.
Restores are only ever performed by the Freedam operations team, and only when genuinely needed — it is not a self-service action, precisely because it is a whole-workspace operation.
If you ever have a specific concern about data loss or need to understand these guarantees for a compliance or security review, contact your Freedam account representative.