Where Your Data Is Stored

Three kinds of storage, holding three different sorts of thing.

Records

Anything with fields — leads, accounts, contacts, calendar events, timecards, settings — lives in a distributed SQL database. "Distributed" means it isn't one machine holding one copy: several machines each hold a copy of every record, and a write isn't considered done until enough of them agree.

That's what makes losing a machine survivable. The remaining copies serve reads immediately, and the missing copy is rebuilt in the background.

Files

Anything you upload — documents, images, recordings, marketing materials — goes into object storage, which is a system built for files rather than for rows. Files are stored in buckets and replicated across sites, so a file is not a single object on a single disk.

Files are never served directly from storage to a browser. A request comes through KamoUniverse first, which checks that the person asking may have that file. A file's storage address is not a way around its permissions.

In-flight state

A few things are deliberately temporary: your signed-in session, a live call, an open chat window. These live in memory rather than on disk, and are meant to disappear — a session that survived forever would be a security problem, not a feature.

Backups

Records are backed up on a schedule, and the backups are stored separately from the running system. That covers the failure a replicated database doesn't: somebody deleting something they shouldn't have.

Replication protects against a machine dying. Backups protect against a mistake. They're different problems and they need different answers.

Data residency

If your organization has a legal requirement about which country your data sits in, that's a deployment question rather than a setting, and it needs a conversation. Getting Support is the way to start one.