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Backup Strategy
What makes InterSpots stand out is our dedicated systems include remote server backup strategies. We allocate large amounts of storage on one of our backup servers for your data. This is performed through a secondary network card only accessible through our internal network. For security reasons these backups are not accessible via the Internet.
Website Backups
Website files are backed up in daily increments and weekly full dumps. Depending on your needs, backups can be performed more frequently. Although automated, the more frequent the backups the more hard drive space is required to accommodate the data.
Database Backups
For web sites with large amounts of content and dynamic data the database is most important and most fragile. It is very easy to corrupt a table and render a website useless. It is also most probable that code somewhere in the site will accidentally 'destroy' data, either through computer coding or user error (e.g. inputting incorrect or deleting data).
We recommend automated scripts perform daily off server backups of the SQL databases. Once setup, these scripts automatically keep 7 days worth of backups and then archive weekly and monthly backups as well. These backups are stored off your dedicated server to prevent loss from hard drive failures, hackings or data corruption.
Depending on your needs, database backups can be performed multiple times per day. If database uptime is extremely critical then a clustered SQL server with replication is recommended or using a fully transactional log database (Microsoft SQL). Both these solutions we can discuss with you further at any time.
Additional Backup Option
Cold Swap Hard Drive Backup, provides a true image of the system. Every single file on the server is copied in its exact state, meaning if any of your hard drives fail, we can get you up and running in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours. This is due to the operating system, web site files and all server configuration already copied and configured on the "cold swap" hard drive.
Having backups are essential, but most people don’t realize, in a web environment standard backups are only useful for prevention of data corruption or accidental deletion. It is true that if a hard drive crashes then you can recover from backups, however, it takes a long time to reinstall and reconfigure the operating system before any backups can even be restored.
Standard recovery requires a total reinstallation of the operating system plus the recompiling of all dependant packages (eg. apache/php/security updates). This can take between 12 to 24 hours, tweaking everything to resemble how things were before the crash. If you require a Unix based operating system there may be dependant modules which conflict on the server rebuild, thus causing more time to recover.
We recommend a cold swap hard drive backup together with standard backups.
With a cold swap solution implemented a crashed hard drive can be quickly replaced with the 'cold swap' hard drive. At which time we recover the different files from the most recent backups. Total time of recovery for replacement of hard drive, approximately 10 to 15 minutes and then 10 to 15 minutes to recover from recent backups (estimates are affected based on the hard drive size).
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