Recently saw a post about offsite backups and that it is criminal in this day and age that we do not have them. It’s a good point, but what is the best way to do it? Some key points we need to consider are:
– Why do I need a Backup and Restore plan?
- System failure – Hard disk expires, fire, theft, human error; basically everything lost in seconds.
- Dispute with service provider – Held to ransom over your data.
- Peace of mind – Why worry about it when you can fix it.
– Where to store the backups? Here’s our list in order of preference (Best to worst)
- Hot Spare – This is basically another server somewhere which is always running a live replica of your site(s). The “disaster recovery” process could be as simple as pointing your URL/web address to the backup server.
- Storage-as-a-Service – Dropbox, Google Drive offer cheap and even free storage. We use Google Drive and the 5Gb for free is ample for the average website.
- On one of your home/office machines or even your phone – Depending on the volume of data and the speed of your Internet connection there are many options.
- On the server itself – Possible, but has minimal benefit and really only useful to recover from an error.
– Make it seamless
- Automation – “Get this and put it there”
- Scheduling – “Do it once a day” or “Do it now”
– Validate
- Notification – Just a little message to say that everything seems to be OK.
- Recovery Verification – “Did it work” and even better “Can I recover from it?”. Don’t wait until it’s too late to find out that your backups were incomplete!!
That’s it for now… More ramblings as they come along 🙂