The Importance Of Back-Ups

backup-and-recovery

Back-ups in the IT world are very much like, house or car  insurance, its something you only ever think about when things go wrong. And unfortunately most companies especially SME’s tend to completely overlook back-ups until something goes wrong.

This can be for a number of reasons such as:

  • cost savings,
  • not understanding the importance of back-ups,
  • not having someone with the skill to set them up
  • Simple just forgetting about them.

I’ve personally lost a hard drive on my own PC many years ago, which contained three years of work. It’s certinaly not a good experience and not one i would recommend.
Most  people only  tend to learn about the importance of back-ups after a bad experience , generally one which cost’s alot of time and money.

The simple reason is  a hard drive may fail at any time for whatever reason and that is why you see the “cloud” growing at the rate it is, as it lets you bypass the traditional model of storing all your data on a single device.

Here at dediserve we store all customers data via a highly redundant SAN storage device  , which connects with the hypervisors (servers) via fiber channel. This ensure that should the server or node in our cloud fail, your data is completely secure and the server side access to your VPS can just be moved to another note without issue.

We also built in a back-up feature which with one click, will enable automatic back-ups. We take a daily/weekly/monthly server back-up for you forever , until you disable the feature or close down your account. We also allow you to take manual back-ups if your working on the server and need an up to the minute snapshot in case something goes wrong.

back-ups

At the moment, these back-ups can’t be exported easily , so on our next upgrade we will add this as a feature. Making it alot easier for you to either move your data to another server to import your data from an existing server.

With storage space being so cheap nowadays and the hassle of tape back-up long in the past , people no longer have an excuse to not back-up their data, after all, this data contains nearly every aspect of your business and should be treated with the same importance as every other facet of your company.


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  • Joe

    The backup function works great, It would be perfect if there was a status bar or % / timer to indicate how long the backup takes.

  • http://www.dediserve.com Aidan

    True Joe , would be a nice feature , i’ll add it to my to-do list for the next features upgrade.

  • http://www.blikkasm.com/ Pett

    Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later.

  • http://www.hosting365.com edbyrne

    What if the SAN itself has a failure or data corruption?

  • http://www.dediserve.com Aidan

    we take hourly snapshots of all active SAN volumes , which provide protection against human error and data coruption , and we are currently deploying our second data centre which will come online in jan , and allow us to store those back-ups offsite providing an additional layer of redundancy.

  • http://cgarvey.ie/ cgarvey

    Nice work Aidan.

    Question for you, if you don’t mind! What level of control does one have over the backup? Can you specify which directory/ies you want backed up, or is it an entire volume only? Leading on from that, what if you want to restore 2 files (and just those 2) from your backup? Are you limited to restoring the entire volume?

    Nice to see you’ve given this feature the priority it deserves. Many other VPS providers fall down badly here.

  • http://www.dediserve.com Aidan

    Hi cathal,

    At the moment , the back-ups are only disaster recovery , so it’s the whole volume that is backed up on the daily/weekly/monthly basis. which means it’s the whole volume that is restored during recovery.

    We are also working on an additional feature at the moment which will allow you to migrate the back-ups to other virtual machines , as well as allow you to store them on your local directory.

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