Hello. My name is Gleb and I am the head of the DevOps department. We configure and maintain servers for CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor projects. Today, I want to tell you why backing up your files is important.
The Reason
About a year ago, a client asked us to help recover his online store — he accidentally deleted his virtual machine. We contacted the hoster. It turned out that they don’t do backups. We asked the client, and all he could provide was 3-month old backups from his laptop. We managed to recover the store, but the 3-month work was lost for good.
Web projects cannot be run without backups. Today everything’s going well, and a few months later something may go wrong. According to the statistics of Quest Cloud Computing, 7 out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year. The reasons range from the carelessness of the manager or the programmer to a fire in the data center due to cooling problems. To protect yourself and your business from trouble, do backups.
The Right Way
If you do backups on a flash drive or laptop whenever you remember, you’re doing it wrong. It’s of crucial importance to save data on a regular basis. Do it often: my advice for small stores is to back up files at least once per day.
Backing up to the same server your store is running on is useless—you risk losing it all. Backing up to another server is the way out, preferably to a server in another data center. Keep more than one copy, do not overwrite the old one: you will get upset when you face an error a few days later, and you won’t have the old backups at hand. I recommend keeping at least three copies.
It’s even worse when you do backups but you don’t test restores. According to the Symantec statistics, 68% of companies lost data and failed to restore their information from backups. Also, do not forget to check the integrity of the data regularly.
How We Do It
Our team can help you back up your business. We can set up scheduled backups and find a place to keep them.
We offer 100GB of disk space to store copies on our server to the clients of our technical support. We use the RAID (redundant array of independent disks) system on our server so that we don’t lose all of the copies with a crash on one of the disks.
We back up the code and database during nights when there’s less traffic on your site. We perform test restores every month. Thus, we can be sure that backups are done accurately.
If you have any questions about backing up or restoring data, please EMAIL US.