Daily Disaster Recovery Files for Telecom Resellers

If your billing system goes down, how long until you can invoice again? For most UK telecoms resellers, the honest answer is “longer than we’d like to admit.” That gap is what the daily Disaster Recovery Files feature is designed to close.

It is also your data. You should expect a copy of it. Most billing platforms keep customer records, tariffs, and invoice history locked inside their own system, leaving resellers with no way out if the provider has an outage, raises prices, or goes under. SAFE takes the opposite view: every reseller gets automatic, encrypted access to a full copy of their customer data, every day, included as standard. No request, no extra fee, no support ticket.

Key Takeaways

• 46% of UK small businesses identified a cyber breach in 2025, and only 25% of UK businesses have a formal incident response plan (Gov.uk Cyber Security Breaches Survey, 2026)
• SAFE gives every reseller automatic, encrypted access to a full copy of their customer data, included as standard, which most billing platforms do not
• Files cover customers, numbers, tariffs, recent invoices, and call records
• You can pull files manually or push them to your own SFTP server or cloud object storage
• As a telecoms provider you must report personal data breaches to the ICO within 72 hours under PECR

Key terms in this article

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery is the set of processes and tools that bring your business back online after an outage, breach, or data loss event. For a telecoms reseller, that means restoring billing data fast enough to invoice on schedule and answer customer queries.

What does RPO mean?

RPO (recovery point objective) is the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose, measured in time. A 24-hour RPO means you can survive losing up to a day’s worth of changes. SAFE’s daily exports give you a 24-hour RPO without any setup.

What does RTO mean?

RTO (recovery time objective) is how long you can be down before the business takes serious damage. For a small reseller mid-billing-cycle, that’s usually a day or two. Your DR plan should aim to bring billing back online inside that window.

What is encryption at rest?

Encryption at rest means data files are scrambled when stored on disk so they’re unreadable without the key. SAFE encrypts each Disaster Recovery File before it leaves the platform, and the password sits inside your account.

What Are Disaster Recovery Files?

Disaster Recovery Files are daily encrypted exports of the data your business depends on, handed back to you automatically. Ask your current billing provider for the same and you will likely get a quote, a delay, or a polite no. With SAFE it is built in. 46% of UK small businesses identified a cyber breach or attack in 2025 (Gov.uk, 2026), so having a copy of your data outside the platform is no longer a nice-to-have.

Each daily file includes:

• Customer records with billing addresses, contacts, and account settings
• Telephone number assignments showing which numbers belong to which accounts
• Tariff and pricing data, including recurring charges and discount plans
• Invoices, including the bill PDF, available daily, weekly, or monthly
• Call detail records processed in the current export window
• Payment status for outstanding and recently settled invoices

The exact field set is documented inside the platform and may change as new features ship. If you need to know exactly what’s in your file, ask us and we’ll send the current schema.

How the Daily Export Works

Each night, SAFE assembles a snapshot of your account into a single archive, encrypts it, and makes it available for download. The whole process is automatic, so there’s nothing for you to schedule or remember.

• Files are generated daily, typically in the early hours UK time
• Each file is encrypted before it leaves the platform
• The decryption password sits in your account dashboard
• A short retention window keeps the most recent files online for you to pull at will
• Older files expire automatically after the retention window, so pull or push copies before then

If you’d rather the files arrived somewhere outside the platform automatically, see “Storing Your Recovery Files” below.

Why Daily Backups Matter for Telecoms Billing

UK SMBs are not just at risk: they’re already being hit. 42% of micro businesses and 46% of small businesses identified a breach or attack in 2025 (Gov.uk Cyber Security Breaches Survey, 2026). Phishing is by far the most common attack type, hitting 38% of businesses, while ransomware affects roughly 1% of businesses but with much heavier consequences when it lands.

For a telecoms reseller, the consequences are sharper than for most. You hold call records, payment details, and customer contact information for every account you bill. Lose access to that for a week and you can’t invoice, can’t reconcile, can’t respond to customer queries. Cash flow stops.

There’s also a regulatory angle. As a telecoms provider, you must notify the ICO within 72 hours of any personal data breach under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (ICO, 2026). Having a recent, verified copy of your data makes that notification easier and shortens the time to recovery.

Storing Your Recovery Files

Keeping the files inside the platform is fine for casual access. For real disaster cover, push them somewhere else. Three patterns work well:

Push to your own SFTP server

If you run a Linux server or a network-attached storage device with SFTP, SAFE can drop each daily file into a directory of your choice. This is the cleanest option if you already manage your own infrastructure.

Push to cloud object storage

Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, and similar object storage services accept the files directly. Set the bucket to use server-side encryption and versioning, and you’ve got an off-site copy that’s hard to lose.

Manual download to consumer cloud

If you’d rather keep things simple, log in once a week and download the latest file. Drop it into Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. Less automated, but better than nothing.

Whichever approach you take, keep the decryption password somewhere separate from the files themselves. A password manager works. An email to yourself does not.

Testing Your Disaster Recovery Plan

A backup you’ve never tested isn’t really a backup. Only 25% of UK businesses have a formal incident response plan (Gov.uk, 2026), so even a basic test puts you ahead of three-quarters of the field.

A simple quarterly test takes 30 minutes:

1. Pull the most recent file from your storage location
2. Decrypt it using the password from your dashboard
3. Open the customer extract and pick five accounts at random
4. Cross-check those accounts against what’s currently in SAFE
5. Note any discrepancies and tell us if you spot anything missing

Run that once a quarter and you’ll know your DR plan actually works rather than hoping it does.

Getting Started

Disaster Recovery Files are on from day one. There is nothing to switch on. To download a file or set up automated export:

1. Log in to your SAFE dashboard
2. Go to Advanced → Disaster Recovery Files
3. Download the latest file, or configure automated transfer to your own SFTP server or S3 bucket
4. Note your decryption password and store it somewhere safe

If you’d like a hand setting up automatic transfer to your own storage, or if you need a sample file to test against, contact our support team and we’ll walk you through it. For deeper detail on how billing data flows through the platform, see our API access guide.