During September, we’re going to run a series of blog posts under the category of ‘NetWeaver Difference’. These will give a little insight into how we do things, and why they are good for your website.
We’ll start with backups – we all know how vital they are, but are often overlooked as they can be time consuming and costly. Many web hosts don’t do backups at all, it helps keep the prices down which is a driving factor in choosing where their site should be for many. We do things a little better than that.
Firstly, we run a separate network for backups, not connected to the internet. On this network we run a dedicated backup server, using software from R1Soft. Every single hour, this backup server connects to all other servers and completes an incremental backup (copying just the data that has changed), which takes just a few minutes and doesn’t add any significant load on the server. This means we never have backups more than an hour old. The backup is then duplicated across RAID mirrored disks, just to be extra safe.
In the event of an accidentally deleted file, or a failed software upgrade, we can restore it quickly and easily. In the event of a complete hardware failure we can restore to a replacement server with everything exactly as it was before the crash.
