It is unfortunate to see this thread not getting more support but I'm not surprised. Backups are not something most people think of until it is needed.

Considering all that is going on these days it is highly irresponsible of Blackbaud not to have a better backup and recovery system considering how easy it is for data in grade books to get deleted. If i had known that Blackbaud only had either a last 24 hours or 4 weeks ago backup it would have been a deal breaker and we would have gone with a different system.

Storage is cheap, loss of data isn't. After a new employee accidentally used error to move a student to a new section of a class all of their grades were lost and now those parents are threatening to pull the student. That is a $240,000 error over the course of 4 years that should be easily solved. 

Considering the cost of this system there is no excuse to not have a better backup system. What does this say about a company we have entrusted to secure our most important data if they cannot even perform industry standard data backup procedures. What other standard practices are they not performing that is putting our data at risk? 

At the least, as the originator of this idea stated, there should be a method of a Platform Manager or Data Manager to manually download a copy of the grade book or other information. At most, it should take a programmer an hour or two to write a query to pull the grade books and put it into a CSV file for download.   

This is a really ridiculous issue to have in 2017. You know it would be much cheaper to use a WordPress theme and add a widget to run automatic backups nightly. That is what I'm going to do today. I purchased a theme for less than $100 and found a reputable hosting company and will spend far less than what I pay blackbaud.