A Time Matters question about Mobility vs Synching:

Question: “can you enlighten me on the TM mobility as to the storage of the data.  Is our data stored in a “cloud” and we access it on the TM mobility website?  If so, how often is the data backed up?  I am trying to make sure that we can still have access to the data even if the server were to go down or we would lose power in the office. ”

Answer:
TM Mobility works as follows, when you login you are authenticating via the cloud (Microsoft Azure I believe, on dedicated Lexis servers) and then you are passed thru to your own Time Matters (SQL database).   So your access to data is dependent on your server and the TM database  being available.

The synch is different. For example, if you synch Time Matters with Microsoft’s Exchange server (we do this routinely using the Exchange component of Microsoft Office 365)  then if your server were down, you would still have web access to email, calendar and contacts.  We also routinely backup documents using an offsite cloud service, which means documents could be accessed as well.

Case in Point:
If you lose your smart phone 
– TM Mobility means you haven’t lost control of all your contacts and calendar.
– TM/Exchange Synch – you may have lost control of all your contacts and calendar.

If you lose your server:
There are strategies for assuring a very high degree of redundancy and for enabling a fast recovery both on-site and off-site.  An on-site server image backup is good to have and easy to set-up. An off-site backup, with a plan for firing up a physical or virtual server is also a well proven strategy.  Bottom line is there are different options and levels of  redundancy, backup and disaster recovery.

We’ll promise not to represent ourselves in court or prepare our own estate planning documents  if you, our lawyer friends, reach out to us for guidance on technical issues like those above.  Let us know if you need more detail, we are here to help.