Data Storage and Archival Policy

1. Your Data is Always Yours (But all bets are off if you don’t pay for the software)

Merus, Inc. does not own any data, information or material that you submit to the Service in the course of using the Service (“Customer Data”). You, not Merus, Inc., shall have sole responsibility for the accuracy, quality, integrity, legality, reliability, appropriateness, and intellectual property ownership or right to use of all Customer Data, and Merus, Inc. shall not be responsible or liable for the deletion, correction, destruction, damage, loss or failure to store any Customer Data. In the event this Agreement is terminated (other than by reason of your breach), Merus, Inc. will make available to you a file of the Customer Data within 30 days of termination if you so request at the time of termination for a modest prepaid fee to cover retrieval, media, and shipping. Merus, Inc. reserves the right to withhold, remove and/or discard Customer Data without notice for any breach, including, without limitation, your non-payment. Upon termination for cause, your right to access or use Customer Data immediately ceases, and Merus, Inc. shall have no obligation to maintain or forward any Customer Data.

2. In the event of a nuclear holocaust, we might lose a few hours of data, but probably not

Files saved to the MerusCase system are immediately backed up in multiple data centers across several time zones. “Immediately” in this context is typically less than 500 milliseconds, but may take up to a few minutes with large files.

MerusCase uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service to facilitate this level of real time data redundancy. According to Amazon (Retrieved from http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/ in April 2014): “Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. In addition, Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.”

Database-driven transactions, i.e., non-file based data saved to MerusCase application directly in a browser, may take up to several minutes to propagate across redundant data storage facilities. A “snapshot” archive of the production database is created on a daily basis.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, MerusCase engineering might have to revert to a snapshot archive from the night before and restore the dataset to a new data center that hasn’t been overrun by the walking dead. For your typical act of god, however, no data ever saved to MerusCase is ever in danger of being lost under any circumstances.

3. Archive of Data You Have Manually Deleted

Manually deleted data is kept in a transitional, but unavailable, state in the MerusCase system for a period of 14 days. After 14 days, such data is permanently deleted and cannot be restored without significant assistance from the Merus Product Development team.

For up to 90 days, manually deleted items are kept in an “archive” format that represents a snapshot of data created once per day.

For up to 365 days, archives of monthly snapshots are kept.

For up to 3 years, archives of quarterly snapshots are kept.

After 3 years, all manually deleted data is permanently deleted without any possibility of recovery. Merus, Inc. guarantees that all such data is permanently deleted in no more than 7 years under any circumstance.

Note that items “unsychronized” or otherwise deleted from a remote email server outside of the MerusCase application is considered “manually deleted”. For example, removing email synchronization capabilities from a MerusCase user account would cause previously synchronized messages that are otherwise unattached from other resources (e.g., a history or chronology record connected to a case matter) to be marked deleted.

4. Archive of Active Data

Backup copies of data “Snapshots” are kept for active data on the same schedule defined in the section above describing manually deleted data.