Data integrity, backups & liability

Effective date: July 12, 2026.

Our role vs. your data's durability

NextELN provides the software — the notebook, inventory, search, and AI. The durability of your data (that it is stored reliably, replicated, and backed up) is provided by specialized database and object-storage companies, not by us. This is a deliberate design choice that gives you stronger guarantees than a single application vendor could.

Where your data lives

• Trial / free (shared): temporarily on our shared, professionally-hosted database and object storage while you evaluate the Service.
• Bring your own (recommended as you grow): in your own account at a professional provider — Aiven, Supabase, Neon, or AWS for the database; Cloudflare R2 or AWS S3 for files. You control it, you own the backups, you set the retention.
• Managed HA cluster (optional): we operate a high-availability database + storage on your behalf, billed at cost plus a margin, with automated failover and point-in-time backups.

Why we delegate to professional companies

Reliable data storage requires replication across machines and data centers, automated backups, point-in-time recovery, 24/7 monitoring, and formal availability commitments (SLAs, often 99.9–99.99%). Companies like Aiven, Supabase, Neon, AWS, and Cloudflare are specialists whose entire business is running durable, redundant infrastructure. By storing your Content in their systems — either your own account or our managed cluster — your data inherits their redundancy and SLAs, which are far stronger than any single application could provide. This is why we do not store your data on a single server and why we encourage bring-your-own or managed professional storage.

Our commitments

• Encrypt sensitive credentials at rest (AES-256) and all traffic in transit (TLS).
• Enforce strict per-workspace isolation in the application and at the database level (Postgres row-level security).
• Provide export/archive so you always have a downloadable copy of your Content (Admin → Archive). For inactive individual/team accounts we automatically export to a backup file and free the live copy after ~5 weeks — you can download or restore it any time. Unpaid company accounts on their own database are billing-suspended (data untouched) rather than freed. See the Terms for the full policy. Your Content is never lost.
• Operate on a best-effort basis to keep the Service available.

Your responsibilities

• Keep your own backups appropriate to how critical your data is — especially in BYODB/BYO-storage mode, where your provider account and its backup settings are under your control.
• Safeguard your credentials and connection strings.
• Choose a provider/plan whose durability and SLA match your needs.

No guarantee against data loss; limitation of liability

No system can guarantee zero data loss. The Service is provided "as is," without warranty that data will not be lost or corrupted. Because your data's durability is provided by third-party database and storage companies, our liability for loss, corruption, or unavailability of data is limited to the maximum extent permitted by law and as set out in the Terms of Service. For mission- critical data, use a professional provider with a strong SLA (or our managed cluster) and maintain independent backups.

Recommended practice

1. Move off the trial onto your own database + storage (or our managed cluster) before storing important data. See How to set up your database & storage.
2. Enable automated backups at your provider and verify you can restore.
3. Periodically download the in-app archive export as an extra copy.

Questions: support@nexteln.com.