Bad things happen. Our comprehensive backup plans account for catastrophic failures. Our backup methods proven and reliable. We go through routine checks to ensure backups are safe, sane and in a restorative state. With multiple, redundant levels of backups stored off-site and run at least twice daily we can handle anything from an accidental "oops! I deleted an image!" to a catastrophic server failure.
Our Backup Plans adhere to the “3-2-1 philosophy”.
3 types
of backups
1. Hosting Facility
A full image of your server is made once a week. This allows quick restoration in the event of a catastrophic event.
2. Private Cloud
We developed an in-house backup solution that backs up server configuration files, web site files and nightly database exports and stores them via private network in a secure cloud storage.
3. WordPress
UpdraftPlus (Premium) backs up entire site files and databases multiple times daily to both local and private cloud storage.
Two different formats.
We utilize at least two different types of backups in case one restoration type fails we have a fallback.
Type 1
Server Image
- Weekly backup
- Rapid restore
- Full server snapshot
- 1 copy retained
Type 2
Incremental
- Full weekly backup
- 2x daily incremental backups
- File-level restoration
- 2 week retention
One copy stored off-site
Backups are made to our mass storage system within the hosting facility as well as to private Amazon S3 buckets. Off-site backups run nightly and are retained for 2 weeks. Files are important but databases are critical. And backing them up every 24 hours can lose a day of work. That is why we back up our databases every 12 hours. Our WMD Shield package runs database backups every 8 hours.
Our commitment to data privacy: all backups stored off-site are encrypted to keep your data safe and secure.
Isn’t that a bit overkill?
Not if you have ever had a catastrophic crash. All of our backup scenarios are built and tested so that in a catastrophe we can restore your systems to a recent solid, sane and reliable state.
What is the
restore process?
We start by attempting to restore your snapshot. This gets us the base server and operating system and your configuration files. Next we pull the latest backup of the files and database and restore them so your information is up-to-date.
What if the snapshot
is corrupt?
We build you a new server. Once the new server is ready we can restore all of your files and databases from one of our remote backups.
3 types explained
Weekly Snapshot
The weekly snapshot takes a literal snapshot of your server at the time. It is a perfect clone of your server that can quickly restored. This is first line of defense in the event of a catastrophic failure. It can get your system back up and running quickly, though it may contain slightly outdated information. That is where the other backups come into play.
On-server
The on-server routines run a full backup every Sunday and stores your backups in our secure private cloud repository. These backups focus on storing 3 directories:
- /home – where your web sites and their files are stored.
- /etc – configuration files for everything on your server
- /var – file such as log files and your database
Each day at 2AM and 2PM incremental backups are run which perform two tasks:
- A complete backup of your database is created and 14 copies (2 backups for 7 days) are retained.
- The system compares the files being backed up to the most recent full backup as well as the previous backup and stores the file deltas – only files that have been added or have changed from the previous backups. This is referred to as an “incremental backup” in that a full backup is not needed which saves space.
Databases
Reliable database backups are more crucial than ever. And backing up databases once a week is worthless. Backing them up once a day guarantees a full day’s work can potentially be lost.
Each server is backed up using two separate backup solutions each day. One backup runs at 2AM and 2PM.
The other runs every 8 hours – 3 times a day – to ensure you have a backup of your most recent data. Database backups are performed at 12 midnight, 8 AM and 4PM.