Terms of use

These terms are a contract between you and SHIELD DATA SYSTEMS PTY LTD (ACN 696 553 036, ABN 46 696 553 036), an Australian proprietary company registered in Australia and based in New South Wales.

They cover two different things and it matters which one you are doing:

• Using this website. These terms apply the moment you read a page. That part is short and sits in its own section below.
• Buying the verification service. These terms are the baseline. An engagement would be a separate written agreement that names the systems, the schedule, the checks, the region, the price and the term, and that agreement prevails over these terms wherever the two differ.

Nothing on this website is an offer capable of acceptance. No engagement exists until there is a signed written agreement. If somebody tells you otherwise, they are wrong and we will honour the written document.

Because a set of terms can make a company sound larger than it is, this section states the position plainly and forms part of the contract.

• SHIELD DATA SYSTEMS PTY LTD was registered in 2026.
• It has no customers and has never had one.
• It has never performed a restore rehearsal for anyone, and has never held, read or restored a backup belonging to another organisation.
• Nothing described in the catalogue on this website is running in production.
• No price is published, because nothing has been sold.
• It holds no security certification, no accreditation and no professional indemnity or cyber insurance policy.

Everything written in the future or conditional tense on this website is a description of an intended service. Targets in the catalogue are what we would be willing to contract to, not measurements of anything that has happened. Treating them as a track record would be a mistake, and we would rather say so here than have somebody infer it.

The Australian Consumer Law is Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth). Where you acquire something from us as a consumer within the meaning of that Law, which for many business purchases includes acquisitions under the statutory threshold and acquisitions of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use, you have guarantees including that services are rendered with due care and skill, are fit for any disclosed purpose, and are supplied within a reasonable time.

The statutory wording

Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. For a major failure with the service, you are entitled to cancel your service contract with us and to a refund for the unused portion, or to compensation for its reduced value. You are also entitled to be compensated for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage. If the failure does not amount to a major failure, you are entitled to have the problem rectified in a reasonable time and, if this is not done, to cancel your contract and obtain a refund for the unused portion of the contract.

Misleading conduct cannot be contracted out of

Neither can section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law. If a statement on this website turns out to be misleading, no clause here helps us, and none is written to try.

Limitation the Law permits

To the extent the Australian Consumer Law permits and it is fair and reasonable to do so, our liability for failure to comply with a guarantee other than one under sections 51 to 53 is limited, at our election, to supplying the services again or paying the cost of having them supplied again.

What it is

A restore that runs on a schedule against backups you already have, a set of checks you specify run against the restored copy, and a dated written record of what happened. That is the entire product.

What it is not

• It is not a backup product. We do not take backups, we do not store them, and we are not a place your data lives. If your backups stop being taken, we would tell you that a rehearsal found nothing to restore, which is useful, but the backup itself remains yours to run.
• It is not disaster recovery. A rehearsal proves a restore worked in an isolated environment. It does not fail your production system over, and it will not do so in an emergency.
• It is not a security assessment. We do not review your architecture, your access controls or your code.
• It is not certification. An evidence file is a record of what we observed. It is not an audit opinion, it is not signed by an auditor, and presenting it as one would misrepresent it.
• It is not advice. We are not your lawyers, your auditors or your insurers, and an evidence file is not a legal or accounting opinion about your obligations.

What a passing rehearsal proves, exactly

That on a stated date, a stated backup restored into a stated environment and passed the stated checks, in a stated time. It does not prove that the next one will, that a different system will, that the backup is complete, that it contains what you assume it contains, or that your business could actually operate on it. Where a check we ran was the wrong check, a pass means the wrong thing passed. Choosing the checks is the customer's decision and it is the part of the service that most deserves the customer's attention.

The service cannot work on our side alone, so an engagement would put these on the customer.

• A credential that can read the backups and do nothing else. We will decline one with wider rights, including any credential that can write to or delete from a production system.
• Authority to give it. You confirm you are entitled to authorise a third party to restore and read the data in those backups, including where it contains personal information belonging to other people.
• The checks. You specify what a successful restore looks like for your system. We can suggest, but you decide, and the suggestion is not advice.
• Somewhere to send a failure notice, and a commitment to keep that address current. A failure notice sent to a mailbox nobody reads is the same as no notice.
• Telling us about a change that affects a rehearsal, such as a schema change, a new encryption key or a moved storage location.

Where a rehearsal fails because of something in this list, we still charge for the attempt and the evidence file still records what happened. Recording a skipped rehearsal as a skipped rehearsal is part of the product.

In performing the service we would act as a processor for the customer, and the customer remains the entity responsible under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) for the personal information inside its own backups.

• We process only on the customer's documented instructions, and only to perform the rehearsal.
• We do not use customer data for any purpose of our own, including product development, benchmarking, or the training or evaluation of any machine learning model.
• Everyone with access is bound by written confidentiality obligations that survive the engagement.
• Sub-processors are named in the privacy policy, and a customer is told before a new one is engaged, in time to object.
• The region is a term of the engagement, not an implementation detail we may change.
• We assist with access, correction and deletion requests, with breach assessment, and with any privacy impact assessment the customer needs to make.
• Restored data is destroyed at the end of every rehearsal. Everything else is returned or destroyed at the end of the engagement, on the timetable in the privacy policy.
• We notify the customer of a suspected breach affecting its data within 24 hours of becoming aware.

The full account, including the controller and processor split and what happens at the end of an engagement, is in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

No price list

There is no published price because nothing has been sold. Publishing a rate card before a first engagement would be inventing a number and presenting it as a market position.

What we can say about how pricing would work: a fixed monthly fee for a scoped set of systems and a stated schedule, quoted in Australian dollars, agreed in writing before any work starts. No usage meter that surprises anybody at the end of a month, and no charge that depends on how much data a restore turned out to involve.

GST

The company is registered for GST. Where GST applies to a supply, the price will be stated inclusive of it and a valid tax invoice will be issued.

Payment

Terms would be set in the engagement. Where an invoice is genuinely disputed, tell us what is wrong within the payment period and we will hold that part while we sort it out rather than treating a dispute as a default.

The evidence file is the deliverable, so its status is worth writing down.

• What it contains. What was restored, from which backup, when it started and finished, which checks ran, what each returned, the age of the restored point, whether teardown completed, and any error text.
• What it does not contain. The content of the data. Not a sample, not a screenshot, not an excerpt.
• Who owns it. The customer. It is the customer's record of the customer's systems, and the customer may show it to an auditor, an insurer, a board or a regulator without asking us.
• What it is worth. It is a contemporaneous record of what a third party observed, which is more than an internal assertion and less than an audit opinion. Presenting it as certification, accreditation or an assurance report would be a misrepresentation, and we would ask for it to stop.
• Format. A documented open format that can be read without our software, because a record you can only open with a supplier's tool is a record with an expiry date.

Ending it

An engagement would run month to month unless the written agreement says otherwise, and either side could end it with 30 days written notice, for any reason or none. There would be no exit fee and no charge for getting your evidence files out.

Ending it immediately

Either side may end an engagement at once, in writing, on a material breach that is not fixed within 14 days of being pointed out, or if the other becomes insolvent.

Suspension

We may suspend rehearsals where continuing would breach a law, where a credential has been revoked and not replaced, or where a customer's system is behaving in a way that makes a restore unsafe to run. We would tell you why on the same day, and we would not suspend for a payment dispute we are still in the middle of.

If we shut down

A small company can fail. If this one is wound down we commit to at least 60 days written notice to every customer, no new charges after the announcement, evidence files exported and delivered before the last day, and destruction of everything else confirmed in writing. That commitment is made now, when it costs nothing to make, which is the only time such a commitment is worth anything.

We own or have the rights to the software, methods, documents, this website, its text, its structure and the Shield Data Systems name and marks.

The customer owns its own data, its own backups, and the evidence files produced about its systems. We claim no right in any of it and take no licence over it beyond what is needed to run the rehearsal the customer asked for.

Feedback

If you tell us the product should work differently, we may act on it without owing you anything, and you keep whatever rights you already had. We will not claim ownership of an idea because it arrived in an email.

This website

You may read it, print it, quote it with attribution, and link to it. You may not present its text as your own, and you may not use our name or marks in a way that suggests we produced or endorsed something we did not. Nothing here limits fair dealing under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) for criticism, review, parody, satire, reporting news, or research and study.

Each side keeps the other's confidential information confidential, uses it only for the engagement, and protects it at least as carefully as it protects its own.

The usual carve outs apply: information already public without a breach, information already lawfully known, information independently developed, and disclosure compelled by law or by a regulator. Where a disclosure is compelled and we are permitted to say so, we will tell the customer before we make it.

These obligations survive the end of an engagement, and they are not limited to a period of years, because a copy of somebody's production data does not stop being sensitive after three.

Read this with the consumer guarantees section, which overrides it wherever the Australian Consumer Law applies.

What we are responsible for

Loss that is a reasonably foreseeable result of our breach or our negligence, and anything the law does not permit us to limit, including fraud, death or personal injury caused by negligence, and breach of a guarantee that cannot be excluded.

What we are not responsible for

• The state of your backups. If a rehearsal reveals that a backup does not restore, that condition existed before we looked at it.
• A loss suffered because the checks you specified did not test the thing that later mattered. Choosing the checks is yours.
• An outage, corruption or loss in your own systems, or a failure of your infrastructure provider.
• Loss that was not reasonably foreseeable.
• Loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or anticipated saving, suffered in the course of a business rather than as a consumer.

Cap

To the extent the law permits, our total liability in connection with an engagement, in contract, tort including negligence, under statute or otherwise, is limited to the fees paid by that customer in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. Where no fee has been paid, including anyone relying on this website, it is limited to one hundred Australian dollars. The cap does not apply to anything the law does not permit us to cap.

No indemnity from you for our own failure

There is no clause here requiring a customer to indemnify us against the consequences of our own breach or negligence, and there will not be one.

The site is provided as it is. We keep it accurate and we will correct an error when it is pointed out, but we do not warrant that it is free of every error or always available.

• Do not attempt unauthorised access to it or to anything behind it.
• Do not scrape it in a way that degrades it for other people. Reading it, indexing it and quoting it are all fine.
• Do not use it to distribute anything unlawful, and do not attempt to interfere with its operation.

There is no form, no account and no login. If a page ever asks you for a password or a payment detail, it is not ours: close it and tell us at ops@shielddata.link.

Links to other sites are for reference. We do not control them and are not responsible for what they say.

These terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales and the applicable laws of the Commonwealth of Australia. Both parties submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of New South Wales and the courts that hear appeals from them.

Non-exclusive means you may bring proceedings somewhere else where the law gives you that right. A consumer resident outside Australia is not deprived of the mandatory consumer protection of the place they live.

Talk to us first

Write to ops@shielddata.link and set out what happened and what you want. This is a request rather than a precondition, and it does not stop the clock on anything.

Cheaper places to go

In New South Wales the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal hears many consumer matters. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes guidance on which body handles what at accc.gov.au. For a privacy matter the route is the Information Commissioner, described in the privacy policy.

Changes

The version in force is the one published here with the effective date at the top. A change that materially reduces your rights takes effect at least 30 days after it is published, and where there is a live engagement we will tell the customer directly rather than expecting anyone to reread a page.

Severance

An invalid or unenforceable provision is read down so far as necessary to make it valid, or severed if it cannot be, and the rest continues.

No waiver

Not enforcing a provision on one occasion is not a waiver of it.

Assignment

You may not assign your rights without our written consent, which will not be unreasonably withheld. We may assign on a sale of the business, and your rights under these terms and the privacy policy travel with them.

Entire agreement

These terms, the privacy policy, the cookie notice and any signed engagement are the whole agreement about their subject matter. This does not exclude liability for misleading or deceptive conduct, which cannot be contracted out of.

Not legal advice

This is a professionally structured document. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for advice from an Australian legal practitioner about your own circumstances.

Contact

SHIELD DATA SYSTEMS PTY LTD, an Australian proprietary company, ACN 696 553 036, ABN 46 696 553 036, New South Wales. Email ops@shielddata.link.

We do not publish a postal address here. The registered office recorded against ACN 696 553 036 at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission is the address with legal effect for service.