Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
Short answers to the most common questions about lionbackup. Everything is covered in more detail in the documentation.
What is lionbackup?
lionbackup is a cloud backup service for businesses and teams. Data is backed up through a lightweight client, optionally end-to-end encrypted on your system, and transferred to geographically distributed storage zones in Europe. Everything is managed through a customer portal with organizations, projects and access tokens. More under Introduction.
How does the encryption work?
Encryption happens in two stages. Client-side, the lionbackup client can end-to-end encrypt your data before it leaves your system — the client-side keys remain exclusively with you, lionbackup receives the content only as ciphertext. In addition, the objects are stored server-side encrypted in the object storage; the transfer runs exclusively over HTTPS/TLS. Details under Encryption.
Where does my data reside?
In the Storage Zones you choose. Each zone is located in a specific country and operated on the infrastructure of a specific provider — all locations are in Europe. You choose the zone per project. An overview of the locations can be found under Regions and zones.
What do retention period and retention mean?
Backups are kept for a retention period you choose (30 days by default, at most
365 days, adjustable per project). For projects configured accordingly, storage
follows the WORN principle ("Write Once, Read Never"): objects can neither be
changed nor deleted during the retention period, and a write token cannot read
them — protection against accidental or malicious deletion, e.g. in ransomware.
For restores, a separate token with read permission is used. The full path from
stored through expired to deleted is described in the
Lifecycle of a backup.
Which clients and operating systems are supported?
Backups run through the open-source lionbackup client written in Go, which supports Linux and Windows. Prebuilt binaries are available for download; the source code is publicly available.
What happens if I lose my keys?
Because the client-side keys reside exclusively with you, lionbackup cannot restore the affected, client-side encrypted backups if they are lost — that is precisely the essence of end-to-end encryption. Therefore keep key material in a secrets manager and maintain a secured, separate backup of it. See Encryption.
What about GDPR and data processing (DPA)?
lionbackup is designed for sovereign data storage in Europe; the data resides in data centres in Europe. Client-side encryption ensures that the provider receives content only as ciphertext. The relevant legal documents — including the data processing agreement (DPA) and the technical and organizational measures (TOM) — are provided on our website.
How do I get started?
In six steps: sign in to the portal, create an organization, create a project and choose a region, generate an access token, install the client, start your first backup run. The detailed guide is available under Getting started.
How do I get support?
Through the contact options on our website. Anomalies regarding your projects — e.g. from the anomaly detection — are additionally shown directly in the portal and can optionally be received by email.
What happens if an invoice is not paid?
If an invoice remains unpaid after a payment reminder, your organisation's access is temporarily blocked: new backups and restores are rejected, and new access tokens cannot be created. Your stored data remains untouched. The block only starts with the reminder — never during an invoice's normal payment term — and lifts automatically once the balance is settled in full; a partial payment is not sufficient. Details under Portal & organisations.