Are you prepared to lose your data?

SenseiSteve

SenseiSteve

HD Moderator
Staff member
I read threads every day from businesses (on various Internet forums) that have lost their data because their website violated the Terms of Services (TOS) of their host. Often their sites are taken down without notice. Some scenarios were because the client didn’t keep their security patches up-to-date, then were hacked. Others were because they were using a shared IP and that IP was blacklisted for spam violations - maybe not that specific IP - just in that range.

So are you prepared to lose your data?

Seems like a ridiculous question, but many aren’t prepared because they have no plan beyond simply trusting that their web host will provide back ups if necessary. I write about disaster recovery moreso than any other topic because of the severity related to losing mission critical data. More often than not, if you lose your data, you lose your business - or it’s severely impacted.

When selecting a web host, read their Terms of Service carefully - they’re there to protect the host and you, spelling out legal expectations. Regardless, use due diligence to formulate a disaster recovery and business continuity plan that includes routinely scheduled remote offsite backup. Prepare for a worst case scenario.

I relate this to car or health insurance. I hate to pay that bill each month, but I know it’s for my own protection. If you’re the owner or president of your company, you owe it to your clients and employees to secure your business. Stuff happens. It can and does happen to businesses just like yours everyday.

Multiple hard drives in a RAID array fail simultaneously (defective lot). You thought RAID was your backup solution, but turns out - it wasn’t.

Web host locks access to your server because your bookkeeper didn’t pay the bill. I see lots of posts related to this where the recommendation generally is - be nice to the host and maybe they’ll let you have access to your data.

Bottom line

Set aside some time to review and update your disaster recovery and business continuity plan if you have one. If you don’t have one - keep your fingers crossed and hope that Murphys Law passes you by and hits that business down the street first.
 
While we backup daily offsite and have confidence in those backups we also encourage all our clients to maintain current backups of their own data. One can never have too many copies of important data.


Regards,
Chris
 
We do the same thing as postasite; we backup daily and store the backups offsite. But, we strongly encourage my clients to make their own backups as well. Can never be too careful.
 
Hi Everyone,

Can anyone suggest steps of taking back-up of SSL certificates? As there are many different servers and control panels this has become quite a complicated procedure.

Best Regards,


<<MOD NOTE: Signatures must be setup through User CP instead of manually adding them to posts.>>
 
Backups are essential, and not just your hosting site, but your personal computer, your designs, your emails etc etc. There are a number of places out there that offer the service, and for a few dollars you're protected.

I run secondary drives here at my home to protect my business data, my music files and yes, even my pictures & videos :)

A buddy of mine runs a backup service for home computers (and also does backups of websites including MySQL Databases etc). I'm not posting the name here as it may be construed as SPAM, but if you're interested, drop me a PM and I'll pass along his website. You can also get it from our business website posted in the signature.

Backups are VERY important - even months or years later. I still have backups of designs I made in the mid-90's along with accounting records etc.
 
Though, I don't make backups of my account every day, I think that it is necessary for those people who have serious business companies.

But still if you even don't do backups daily, your hosting company should be so reliable that in case the server crashes and some data gets lost, their backup server should be up and running to provide you with the latest backup :smash:
 
That is true Bobz, the company should be reliable enough and responsible enough to take backups. But, the client should take backups as well....I mean it is their stuff right? But, some people are just too busy and not lazy when it comes to taking backups that is where your host comes in. But, once a week even for the busiest of people should be enough for one backup here or there.
 
Well we have had problems where someone signs up for a hosting account and blasts off 50,000 emails, even those type of clients we do not remove from server we suspend there account.

Any accounts suspended on our servers there data is kept for 10 months, I don't know what is the point or removing data instantly, do some companies not have any common sense.
 
Suspensions should be enough to cover most instances, at the very most, package the account, and remove the files. There shouldn't be a need to destroy customer data, but holding for 10 months? If you terminte the customer do you still keep a copy of their data?

Relying on ANYONE to make backups means that you're putting your faith in another company to keep your business on track. We make backups every hour on every server, users can automatically restore that from their control panel (even an individual file, or table), however we STILL state in our Terms of Service that backups are the responsibility of the client. We make every effort to keep backups for everyone, but at the end of the day, pointing the finger and saying "but you said it would be safe", that doesn't do anything to restore the data that was lost.

Setup a cronjob, export the database and have it send via Email Every Week. Use CuteFTP and setup a schedule to automatically get NEW files. Use a 3rd party backup service and then pull a backup yourself also. Taking 15 minutes out of your day every week should be done if your business is important to you!
 
Its certainly a good idea to make sure your hosting provider is backing up your data, but that does not constitute a good backup policy. No provider I've ever heard of is legally responsible for your data, so why give them the sole backup?

Every business must make its own backups, preferably local. And putting your data on optical disks from time to time is also a part of a good backup strategy.
 
I don't think relaying on a web hosting company for your important website backups is the best method. Granted they should do daily or weekly backups but, you should do your own also. The rule of thumb is to have 3 backups in different locations. I have 3 external harddrive and a secondary harddrive in my computer for such occasions.

Its not just a lack of web hosting providers not doing daily or weekly backups. Lets say they do backups. What if the datacenter happens to catch on fire and everything is lost? This stuff does happen, then what? Doing backups in multiply locations will help prevent such a disaster. Great topic!
 
There is no excuse to not have your own back ups, no matter who it is if you care about your data. Have a back up of it and multiple copies in different formats! Things do happen, and its best to plan for it!
 
An outstanding example for addressing remote backups comes from the latest hack at WHT where their backups were deleted.
 
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