Keeping your leads and recordings on your own box

One of the most common questions from teams evaluating a managed VICIdial host is: where does my data actually live? The answer, for both BYOI and single-tenant managed hosting, is that your lead records and call recordings stay on your server — not on a shared database, not on a platform controlled by the host. This post explains what that means technically and what you need to do to keep that data safe.

For context on the full cloud deployment model, see the VICIdial cloud guide.

Where VICIdial stores your data

Lead records — the phone numbers, names, and disposition notes in your Lead database — live in MySQL on the VICIdial server. The primary table is vicidial_list. That database runs on your machine. No remote platform has a copy unless you configure replication yourself.

Call recordings — captured using the Call recording mechanism in Asterisk — are written as audio files directly to the server's local disk. The default location is under /var/spool/asterisk/monitor/. VICIdial writes them in a date-based directory structure. Each file is named with the call's unique ID, the agent, the phone number, and the timestamp. These files never leave the server unless you export them explicitly.

How data flows: who can see what

flowchart TD
  A[Inbound or outbound call completes] --> B[Asterisk writes recording to local disk]
  B --> C[VICIdial logs disposition to MySQL]
  C --> D[Data stays on customer VPS]
  D --> E{Who can access it?}
  E --> F[Customer: root SSH + web UI]
  E --> G[Host: SSH for maintenance only]
  E --> H[No shared platform reads this data]

The managed host has SSH access to keep VICIdial running. They can see that files exist and can restart services, but they do not operate a system that reads or indexes your lead data or recordings as part of normal hosting operations. The access is the same as any systems administrator maintaining a server you own.

Disk space: the recording accumulation problem

Call recordings fill disk quickly. A call center running 100 Concurrent calls for 8 hours a day can generate several gigabytes of audio per day. At the default Recording format (WAV/MP3) (WAV or GSM), a one-minute call produces roughly 1 MB of audio. If your server has a 40 GB disk and you run for a few months without pruning, you will fill it.

Backing up recordings and lead data

For lead data, a daily MySQL dump is a reasonable baseline. The dump can be written to a different directory and then synced off-box via rsync or uploaded to object storage. Something like this on a cron schedule covers the basics:

mysqldump -u root asterisk | gzip > /backup/asterisk-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

For recordings, decide on a Recording retention policy first. Most compliance frameworks require keeping recordings for a specific period — 90 days, 12 months, or longer depending on your industry. Once you know the retention period, set up a two-step process: archive recordings older than 30 days to object storage, then delete anything past your retention window from both the local disk and the archive.

A cloud provider snapshot covers the whole server at a point in time, which is useful for disaster recovery but not for granular recording retrieval. Use snapshots for rebuild scenarios, and use the archive process described above for day-to-day recording management.

What BYOI changes about data ownership

In a BYOI arrangement the cloud account is yours, so the VM — and everything on its disk — is clearly in an account you control. You can take a snapshot, detach the volume, or terminate the server without asking the host. In a standard managed plan the host controls the VM lifecycle, so a data export before termination involves a coordination step. Both are fine in practice; BYOI just has a cleaner separation of legal ownership.

To understand the full BYOI setup process, read the BYOI install checklist.

Whether you choose BYOI or a standard managed plan, your data stays on a single-tenant server you can access directly. For teams that want all the data control without the ops work, see the options on the VICIfast pricing page.