About Our Backups
From OCS Support Wiki
[edit] How We Safeguard Your Data
There are multiple layers of protection for your data. They include:
- Fiercely proactive server security management
- Staying current with all major software, even bug fixes (which can cause data problems on occasion)
- RAID protected servers (if a hard drive fails, data is OK, and downtime is minimal and scheduled)
- Nightly backups of your data onsite (including backups of databases)
- Weekly offsite backups of your data via Amazon's S3 service
Our backups are both done at the package level (cPanel/Webmin) and we also make a backup of each individual file as well. This takes more disk space, but we take protection of your data very seriously.
[edit] What Our Backups Are Designed For
Our backups are designed to recover from corruption, hardware problems, and catastrophic server issues. They are NOT designed to keep multiple copies of your files for your own restores. You can backup the files in your account via FTP or via the backup utilities included in the control panel and UNIX shell. In most circumstances, we do not provide individual file restoration due to you deleting or modifying a file inadvertently. If it is an important piece of data and we have it available in our backups (that is, you tell us right away before it has moved off of our backup servers) we may be able to restore the file. We will consider this on a case-by-case basis, and may have to charge for the time involved.
[edit] Summary
Essentially we have one of the best backup systems available and the likelihood of loosing data on our systems is extremely low (and would require multiple systems with 2 copies of your data in two different formats to fail or be inaccessible). The backups we make are for restoring files and servers in emergencies and are not meant to be used for individual file restores at the requests of customers. Such restores will be considered on a case-by-case basis as available.
