Something we’ve been finding pretty frustrating lately is the whole issue of backups. On my desktop I run Dropbox, but there still isn’t a Dropbox quality (or ease of use) service for hosting companies. If you run a website / service / business you need at the very least, a disaster recovery plan, and that plan involves backups. There are several ways hosting companies deal with this.
1) They dont do them
Yeah you read that right. You don’t actually get backups. These policies are buried deep in their terms of service or usage policies. It’s totally up to you to backup your server content. If you don’t and your server crashes its the end-users problem. High profile data losses can destroy any business, especially startups.
2) Highly Available Storage
This strategy is usually combined with #1 above. Instead of backing up your data they just replicate your data across multiple drives. This means that the chances of you losing your data go down, and depending on the technology used to safeguard against drive failure, you can get really high availability. (iSCSI and ZFS come to mind). Its important to remember that RAID is NOT a backup solution, only a way to mitigate potential failures.
3) OS Level Backups
In this strategy end users are still required to worry about their own data, and choose which sets of data they backup. A hosting company will provide an end-point for you to send your backups to. If you’ve ever done managed or dedicated hosting, this is often the product that is sold. Tivoli or some other backup client is provided, but still relies on either a consultant, sysadmin or service provider to configure correctly.
4) VM Level Backups
There’s another solution that works, and it gets around a lot of the issues with OS level backups, like running a database while doing a backup, etc. Snapshot the entire virtual machine and replicate the VM to an off-site storage system. For better performance, use data de-duplication technology to reduce the amount of time to perform your backup. This system seems to work well, however few providers are offering it.
What do you think? What’s your favourite backup strategy as a hosting company?
Favourite backup strategy? Backup, backup often and backup again.
For shared and reseller hosting customers we use R1Soft CDP on a daily, four hourly or greater frequency depending on server/service.
For dedicated hosting customers R1Soft is available at an additional cost (due to the licensing costs).
We use the WHM Built-in Backup Utility, 3 times a day, backed up to 2 remote NAS. (~300 domains)