Going the Full Mile With Backups! (February 23 2007)
With most web hosting companies backups are simple. Each night or week, your data is backed up onto a secondary hard drive. Then, if you ever need it voila it is right there. But what happens if the backups just ran an hour ago and you need your data from 2 hours ago. Or more commonly, what if upload a new website file 2 days ago and weren't aware of a bug that is now destroying your website?
Don't you just wish someones you can go back in time and correct that simple mistake? Well, with most web hosting companies you can't. They usually have 1 backup of your account on file. Yippee, its almost thrilling but its not.
If your a 9-5 Monday through Friday person, you leave the office Friday after a working on a project. Friday night/Saturday morning the backups run, Saturday night/Sunday morning the backups run again. Then your in the office Monday morning and find out you made a mistake on Friday as you were rushing to leave the office. Time to extract your backup. Ohhh but wait! Its no good anyway since it is from Saturday night/Sunday morning.
So, what do you do? You turn back the
time machine to the week before, get the one file you messed up and rework on it. But, that option is only available to those with a time machine!
And since most people don't have a time machine, we've invented one!
No no no, not that type of time machine! A backup server! Yes, for those unaware we have a server dedicated to just backups. Nothing more or nothing less.
To recap!
Once a night every server makes a complete backup of every site on your server. If your a reseller, it makes a backup of every account under you. If your a normal shared hosting client it makes a complete backup for you too!
Then, once a week that data is transfered onto our backup server.
Thus leaving us with two
complete backups of your website! One right on the server, the other at a remote location!
