Business software with a local backup facility?
Discussion
My accountant wants me to change business software and is pushing something called Xero which is as cloud based thing.
The thing is that it has no facility for saving a local backup copy of my business records to a PC which is physically in my position. Everything is saved on their servers/cloud.
I've been doing a lot of thinking on this and the more I mull it over the more and more insane it seems to me. They (the software company) are asking businesses to consign their entire set of financial records including every single transaction, customer record and other piece of essential information to their 'safe' keeping. The records of the business are essentially under the control of a third party and not the business which owns them.
If for any reason Xero decides to deny you access to your records, or looses them, or has them stolen, or destroys them, or goes out of business and has their assets seized then you are f
ked - well and truly.
Why would anyone choose to do this with their business records? It just seems entirely irresponsible to me. Or am I missing something glaringly obvious?
The thing is that it has no facility for saving a local backup copy of my business records to a PC which is physically in my position. Everything is saved on their servers/cloud.
I've been doing a lot of thinking on this and the more I mull it over the more and more insane it seems to me. They (the software company) are asking businesses to consign their entire set of financial records including every single transaction, customer record and other piece of essential information to their 'safe' keeping. The records of the business are essentially under the control of a third party and not the business which owns them.
If for any reason Xero decides to deny you access to your records, or looses them, or has them stolen, or destroys them, or goes out of business and has their assets seized then you are f
ked - well and truly.Why would anyone choose to do this with their business records? It just seems entirely irresponsible to me. Or am I missing something glaringly obvious?
XERO are based here in MK their office is based on Google's style where they all lounge around on bean bags etc.
I have seen many articles on them and all looks very good, dad was going to move from Sage to XERO but it was going to cost a lot more.
I am a heavy cloud user and if I was in the market for accounting software this would be where my money would be.
I have seen many articles on them and all looks very good, dad was going to move from Sage to XERO but it was going to cost a lot more.
I am a heavy cloud user and if I was in the market for accounting software this would be where my money would be.
Bikerjon said:
It may seem like a giant leap of faith but moving to cloud based systems has a lot of advantages too. Your accountant will be able to login and you can access from anywhere. I actually think that many cloud systems are far better designed and easier to use than legacy software too.
I'm not objecting to the fact that it's cloud based, as such, and I'm not saying that it doesn't work. The thing that I object to is the entirety of my business records, 100% of everything, being entirely under the control of someone else. If they decide to deny me access, or loose my data or it gets stolen or destroyed then I'm Royally fked.Sooner or later it is a certainty that one of these companies will loose data or get hacked or go out of business meaning that potentially thousands of businesses will loose all of their data. That will be cataclysmic.
Why would anyone do this? It just seems staggeringly irresponsible of anyone who runs a business.
Surely it cannot be a terribly difficult matter to enable the system to create a local backup copy so that the business can have independent access to it's own records?
Funny the different ways people look at things. I always hated Sage as I never trusted the backups. It had to be done manually, or at least scheduled. Backups were then emailed to accountants and bookkeepers - very little version control, and old backups ending up all over the place. You ended up doing ridiculous things like taking physical disks home.
Now we never have to think about it. Backups are all automatic, and with the type of enterprise grade hosting that Xero use it's not going to disappear. Xero is itself has over 1m subscribers and growing rapidly. If anything were to happen to Xero from a business standpoint it wouldn't happen overnight. Anyway - you better get used to it - everything is going one way and that's to the cloud. Systems on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud probably run more of your life than you would care to know...
Now we never have to think about it. Backups are all automatic, and with the type of enterprise grade hosting that Xero use it's not going to disappear. Xero is itself has over 1m subscribers and growing rapidly. If anything were to happen to Xero from a business standpoint it wouldn't happen overnight. Anyway - you better get used to it - everything is going one way and that's to the cloud. Systems on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud probably run more of your life than you would care to know...
You're quite entitled to feel more comfortable about having local backups, but you should realise that you're not being rational.
I'm am 100% certain that Xero will have resilience, disaster recovery, backup and restore capabilities that are far in excess of yours. I would be willing to place good money that Xero customers lose a lot less data than people who look after their own.
I'm am 100% certain that Xero will have resilience, disaster recovery, backup and restore capabilities that are far in excess of yours. I would be willing to place good money that Xero customers lose a lot less data than people who look after their own.
alock said:
gotta love
rm -rf *
FreeAgent appears to run on AWS and Xero appears to run on Azure. I'm not sure about Azure as I don't use it, but Amazon's database products (RDS and Aurora) provides backups most people can only dream of - you can recover a full set of data from any point in time at the touch of a button. So I'm quite happy to leave them in charge of my stuff (I'm a FreeAgent customer).
Junior Bianno said:
Now we never have to think about it. Backups are all automatic, and with the type of enterprise grade hosting that Xero use it's not going to disappear. Xero is itself has over 1m subscribers and growing rapidly. If anything were to happen to Xero from a business standpoint it wouldn't happen overnight. Anyway - you better get used to it - everything is going one way and that's to the cloud. Systems on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud probably run more of your life than you would care to know...
Naive bad adviceXero Terms of Use said:
5.3. Backup of Data:
You must maintain copies of all Data inputted into the Service. Xero adheres to its best practice policies and procedures to prevent data loss, including a daily system data back-up regime, but does not make any guarantees that there will be no loss of Data. Xero expressly excludes liability for any loss of Data no matter how caused.
...
8.4 Xero may take any or all of the following actions, at its sole discretion:
4. Terminate this Agreement and Your use of the Services and the Website;
5. Suspend for any definite or indefinite period of time, Your use of the Services and the Website;
6. Suspend or terminate access to all or any Data.
https://www.xero.com/uk/about/terms/You must maintain copies of all Data inputted into the Service. Xero adheres to its best practice policies and procedures to prevent data loss, including a daily system data back-up regime, but does not make any guarantees that there will be no loss of Data. Xero expressly excludes liability for any loss of Data no matter how caused.
...
8.4 Xero may take any or all of the following actions, at its sole discretion:
4. Terminate this Agreement and Your use of the Services and the Website;
5. Suspend for any definite or indefinite period of time, Your use of the Services and the Website;
6. Suspend or terminate access to all or any Data.
Thanks, but no thanks.
alock said:
Xero Terms of Use said:
5.3. Backup of Data:
You must maintain copies of all Data inputted into the Service. Xero adheres to its best practice policies and procedures to prevent data loss, including a daily system data back-up regime, but does not make any guarantees that there will be no loss of Data. Xero expressly excludes liability for any loss of Data no matter how caused.
...
8.4 Xero may take any or all of the following actions, at its sole discretion:
4. Terminate this Agreement and Your use of the Services and the Website;
5. Suspend for any definite or indefinite period of time, Your use of the Services and the Website;
6. Suspend or terminate access to all or any Data.
https://www.xero.com/uk/about/terms/You must maintain copies of all Data inputted into the Service. Xero adheres to its best practice policies and procedures to prevent data loss, including a daily system data back-up regime, but does not make any guarantees that there will be no loss of Data. Xero expressly excludes liability for any loss of Data no matter how caused.
...
8.4 Xero may take any or all of the following actions, at its sole discretion:
4. Terminate this Agreement and Your use of the Services and the Website;
5. Suspend for any definite or indefinite period of time, Your use of the Services and the Website;
6. Suspend or terminate access to all or any Data.
Thanks, but no thanks.
deckster said:
Out of interest, how often do you dry-run your restore procedures?
Just my home laptop has 7 distinct backups across 4 physical locations. I regularly use several of them to access data via different devices.Another key point here is that I can also access files I created for my A-levels in 1992 and every document since. I wouldn't trust any cloud provider to provide easy access to today's files 2042.
surveyor said:
alock said:
Xero Terms of Use said:
5.3. Backup of Data:
You must maintain copies of all Data inputted into the Service. Xero adheres to its best practice policies and procedures to prevent data loss, including a daily system data back-up regime, but does not make any guarantees that there will be no loss of Data. Xero expressly excludes liability for any loss of Data no matter how caused.
...
8.4 Xero may take any or all of the following actions, at its sole discretion:
4. Terminate this Agreement and Your use of the Services and the Website;
5. Suspend for any definite or indefinite period of time, Your use of the Services and the Website;
6. Suspend or terminate access to all or any Data.
https://www.xero.com/uk/about/terms/You must maintain copies of all Data inputted into the Service. Xero adheres to its best practice policies and procedures to prevent data loss, including a daily system data back-up regime, but does not make any guarantees that there will be no loss of Data. Xero expressly excludes liability for any loss of Data no matter how caused.
...
8.4 Xero may take any or all of the following actions, at its sole discretion:
4. Terminate this Agreement and Your use of the Services and the Website;
5. Suspend for any definite or indefinite period of time, Your use of the Services and the Website;
6. Suspend or terminate access to all or any Data.
Thanks, but no thanks.
https://www.freeagent.com/company/terms/
Was wrong about them using AWS for compute and database too (though the use S3 for sure as they were affected by the outage) - looks like a very robust setup:
https://www.freeagent.com/tour/security/
https://www.freeagent.com/support/kb/getting-start...
jamoor said:
I agree with the OP, I'm all for a fully managed cloud based accounting system.
But it would be nice to be able to download the data once a month, twice a year, or even at the end of each year "just in case" and have a local copy of it.
I think we can all agree on thatBut it would be nice to be able to download the data once a month, twice a year, or even at the end of each year "just in case" and have a local copy of it.
Just one other riddle - how do you test an automated feed on a system like this?
Answers on a postcard!
dmsims said:
Junior Bianno said:
Now we never have to think about it. Backups are all automatic, and with the type of enterprise grade hosting that Xero use it's not going to disappear. Xero is itself has over 1m subscribers and growing rapidly. If anything were to happen to Xero from a business standpoint it wouldn't happen overnight. Anyway - you better get used to it - everything is going one way and that's to the cloud. Systems on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud probably run more of your life than you would care to know...
Naive bad adviceThe trouble with cloud backups of this nature is that you're probably only going to ever get raw data. It's not as if you can take that backup data and instantly load it into an offline version of the cloud service or even a competitor product without a fair bit of tweaking. So how much practical use is that local offline backup going to be anyway?
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