FTP & R1Soft Backups

In previous blogs we have talked about cyber security and protecting your data from malicious actions, however, it should be addressed that the biggest causes of data loss in business are simple human error and hardware malfunction. So today, let’s talk about one of the most fundamental procedures to mitigate such an event. And that is having a good backup policy for your server.

Think about what would happen if your company lost any data held on your server. Is your website critical to your business? What would happen if you lost your site files?

For an increasing number of companies today this would be an absolutely catastrophic occurrence which is why most businesses have a backup policy in place as standard. There are many different options when it comes to backups. The main services offered at CWCS are an R1Soft backup or FTP backup depending on your preferences or the support plan you have with us.

An R1 soft backup works on a schedule that can be tailored to your preference whether on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and involves performing a full (block level) backup or an incremental backup. An incremental backup only backs up files that have changed since the last full backup.

We also provide backup solutions in the form of FTP space. This is configured as a simple FTP storage system. It is then up to the customer to send files, control panel backups, or any other data they want to store off their server to the FTP space.

Whatever backup solution you choose, this should be part of your larger disaster recover/data protection plan. When putting together a disaster recovery plan, the common objectives that companies benchmark against are the RPO/RTO parameters.

RPO = Recovery Point Objective

The Recovery Point Objective is the length of time that would be able to pass during a data loss incident before the quantity of data lost in that period of time would be unendurable for the company. Usually a detailed analysis would be done to determine what this length of time was. Another way to phrase this is to ask how much data could be lost without having a long term or critical impact on the company as a whole, and what the length of downtime associated with that amount of data loss would be. This would then determine what the RPO is.

RTO = Recovery Time Objective

The Recovery Time Objective is an SLA for how long it takes the business or process to recover or be restored to normal service, measured from the beginning of the initial disruption. Similarly to the RPO, the RTO is calculated based on how long a recovery could take before it had a long term or critical impact on the company as a whole.

So RPO relates to the amount of data that a company will lose or have to recreate, and the RTO relates to the timeframe of the actual disruption to business operations.

With so many things to consider when setting up your backup policy it can be hard to know where to start. Here are some good examples of the main things to consider and incorporate in to your backup policy:

Automation

Set up an automatic backup so that your server is being backed up regularly without you having to take the time to perform a regular backup manually. This will greatly reduce the risk of you losing something important in the future

Testing

Schedule in a regular test of your backup and restore to ensure that everything you need is being backed up and that there are no issues when restoring this.

Backup your backup

If you are paying for a managed backup service the chances of something going wrong with this are slim. However, if your information is critical to your business, it makes sense to backup to more than one place. A good policy would be to have your managed backup with your hosting provider but then also a local backup of your own in case of emergency.

If you would like to learn more about the backup solutions that CWCS offer or could use some free advice on your current backup and disaster recovery policy, please get in touch with a CWCS managed hosting specialist today.