How to Keep Business Data on Your Own Machines

Reasons vary: customer confidentiality, a wish to avoid lock-in, a need to keep trading through outages, or simply wanting records that do not depend on a supplier's account. Whatever the reason, the principle is the same: the business holds the primary copy and decides who else gets one. The local-first business software page expands on this.

With Aevornix software, business records are stored as follows.

• Sales, stock, purchasing and books: a business file on the shop's computer in Aevornix POS, with each till keeping a complete copy.
• Forms and responses: files you own, with responses optionally encrypted to your private key.
• Records, tasks and dashboards: a workspace folder in Aevornix Workspace.
• Documents and spreadsheets: ordinary files from the Aevornix Suite.
• Dashboards: built in Aev BI from local CSV, XLSX and database sources.

Local does not mean isolated. Aevornix POS tills share through a Local Hub on the shop network or a Sync Bridge on your own server. Forms responses travel by email, USB drive or shared folder. A Workspace can be packaged as one file. In each case, the channel belongs to the business.

A common rule is three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one away from the premises. For a small business using Aevornix software, that can be as simple as the working files on the office PC, a regular backup to an external drive, and a copy kept at a second site. Aevornix POS backups are encrypted and verified, and restore onto a new computer with a safety copy of what was there. Test a restore now and then, because a backup that has never been restored is only a hope.

Keeping data local makes the business responsible for backups, device security and, where it runs one, the sync server. Plan for off-site backup copies and encrypted disks. Data protection duties under UK GDPR still apply to personal data you hold locally.