Why don't web host run offsite backups?

easyhostmedia said:
so you not heard of rSync and cPremote.

using our offsite backups I can have a server backup up and running in a few hours NOT days.

Offsite backups are better than onsite backups
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From the standpoint of protecting host/business and business continuity: It doesn't matter. The backup software is irrelevant here. Even with rsync it will take you at least an hour to transfer 500 GB data over a local 1 Gbs Ethernet link. If you think you will get the same transfer speed over the internet transferring the data from an offsite location you are nuts. How much slower is a couple/few Mbs compared to 1,000 Mbs?

You would be better off having someone at the offsite location deliver you a USB drive with the data with overnight delivery. (Simple arithmetic will verify I am correct here)

Collabora said:
Tip: The offsite backup should be a supplement to the onsite backup, not a replacement. It can take days to recover with an offsite backup. Offsite backups are good in case there is damage to facility or the on-site backup system itself is inaccessible.
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That is "best practice"
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Collabora said:
It doesn't matter. The backup software is irrelevant here. Even with rsync it will take you at least an hour to transfer 500 GB data over a local 1 Gbs Ethernet link. If you think you will get the same transfer speed over the internet transferring the data from an offsite location you are nuts. How much slower is a couple/few Mbs compared to 1,000 Mbs?

You would be better off having someone at the offsite location deliver you the drive with the data with overnight delivery.
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so once again you think you are right.

I know from experience how long it takes, if you have onsite backups and the facility goes down you are stuffed. Any decent host will recommend and use offsite backups.
 
Whether or not a host backs up (on or off site) your hosting account is just a part of the product. If you need them, buy a hosting package that has them or get them from a third party.

Onsite backups are typically seen as adequate protection for something like a $5/month shared hosting account. Due diligence has been achieved.

Offsite backups for a shared hosting account would probably be a bit extreme especially if a host doesn't have a secondary datacenter.

The big boys of backups have bottomed out the backup market, making it tough to offer backups at a price competitive to, for example, Dropbox or Carbonite. You might be better off using a third party even if your host offers them.
 
mikebvm said:
Onsite backups are typically seen as adequate protection for something like a $5/month shared hosting account. Due diligence has been achieved.
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Its an easy and cost effective way if you have a cPanel server to setup cPremote and have this backup all accounts to a secondary server on a daily/weekly or monthly basis.

We do this and then give clients at signup an option to pay £2 extra a month to have access to these backups if they need a copy. If they dont take this option and need a copy of their backup then we charge them a fixed £15.

But it still in our TOS and in every cPanel news area that it is the clients responsibility to take their own backups
 
....And there is a difference between backing up someone's web site and a company's disaster recovery plans. The data on all servers adds up to a lot more than on a single site, increasing time to recovery for a company compared to the customer's site

In the immediate posts above (#18, #19, #21 and #22), Terry was erroneously -- and with great negligence -- insisting that an offsite backup is superior to an onsite one with offsite as supplemental, for a company (the host) disaster plan. He appears under the delusion that software like rsync and cpremote somehow alters the properties of Ethernet and tcp/ip and provides bandwidth where there once was none. He concludes by recommending that an offsite solution should replace an onsite one.

Of course, any server admin worth a dime knows otherwise.
 
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Some food for thought. Here are a couple of times required to transfer 500 GB of data:

Onsite, server to server with perfect fast Ethernet: 1 hr 11 minutes
Offsite, server to server with perfect T1: 32 Days

(note: Offsite backup companies will shut down service for periodic maintenance. Also for offsite recovery, if you still have some servers in production you may not want to use the same bw pipe for recovery as your customers are using for web services)
 
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Collabora said:
(note: Offsite backup companies will shut down service for periodic maintenance. Also for offsite recovery, if you still have some servers in production you may not want to use the same bw pipe for recovery as your customers are using for web services)
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using a backup company is totally different to having your own server and using rSync or cPremote to perform the backups.

4 hrs and i can have all my cpremote backup sites fully restored on a new server ( approx. 300GB).

when using rSync or cPremote the initial backup is long, but then they just take incremental backups, so will only backup and changes made since the last backup.
 
easyhostmedia said:
using a backup company is totally different to having your own server and using rSync or cPremote to perform the backups.

4 hrs and i can have all my cpremote backup sites fully restored on a new server ( approx. 300GB).
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Oh brother. It now seems you don't know the difference between an offsite and onsite backup. It will take you 20 days (per example, about 5 hours with OC-3) to recover 300 GB from an offsite backup. It doesn't matter who owns the offsite storage server. I give up :crash:
 
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Collabora said:
Oh brother. It now seems you don't know the difference between an offsite and onsite backup. It will take you 20 days (per example) to recover 300 GB from an offsite backup. I give up :crash:
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yes i do. the server i use for backup is in a totally different location/Datacenter than that of the servers with my clients so is OFFSITE.

so once again STOP attacking all my posts. you are just making yourself look a fool.
 
An important consideration in disaster recovery planning is Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The RTO is the maximum tolerable length of time that a computer, system, network, or application can be down after a failure or disaster occurs.

The RTO is a function of the extent to which the interruption disrupts normal operations and the amount of revenue lost per unit time as a result of the disaster.

My experience indicates that the cost depends on long-term and intangible effects as well as on immediate, short-term, or tangible factors. Once the RTO for a system has been defined, you can decide which disaster recovery technologies are best suited to the situation -- onsite, offsite, or a hybrid

For example, if the RTO for a given system is one hour, redundant data backup on local onsite external hard drives may be the best solution. If the RTO is five days, then offsite storage on a remote server may be more practical.

Ask yourself, how much do you lose per one hour of downtime?

(This is what Pierre Dorion, the Data Center Practice Director and a Senior Consultant with Long View Systems Inc. tells me.)
 
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NEVER trust one vendor or one platform for your primary data and your backups. Even if your web host does keep backups, always have another external backup provider. Backups are cheap and easy, if your data is worth something you'll keep your own backups, possibly multiple backups, even if your host does keep backups themselves (as they should).

What happens if your host goes out of business or are hit by a major natural disaster? What if there is a major security issue or catastrophic failure that all the data gets wiped? What if your relationship with your provider simply deteriorates (they claim you didn't pay when you did, they become unresponsive, etc.)?

If you don't have backups yourself, you only have yourself to blame. Now, should the host have them as well, certainly, but it is your data, so it is ultimately your responsibility.
 
KarlZimm said:
NEVER trust one vendor or one platform for your primary data and your backups. Even if your web host does keep backups, always have another external backup provider. Backups are cheap and easy, if your data is worth something you'll keep your own backups, possibly multiple backups, even if your host does keep backups themselves (as they should).

What happens if your host goes out of business or are hit by a major natural disaster? What if there is a major security issue or catastrophic failure that all the data gets wiped? What if your relationship with your provider simply deteriorates (they claim you didn't pay when you did, they become unresponsive, etc.)?

If you don't have backups yourself, you only have yourself to blame. Now, should the host have them as well, certainly, but it is your data, so it is ultimately your responsibility.
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+1 on that

Our main client servers are in Chicago
We have a server in New York that is only used as a backup server.
We also have a replicated server in Dallas that we have our New York Backup server mirrored too.

But we always make sure that clients are aware that ultimately it is their responsibility to make their own backups
 
WebHostWala said:
It is a client who has to safeguard his backups and website .. more over there is a CPU resource issue for bigger sites
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You as a web host should also be keeping backups. Lets say you had server wide failure that required you to restore backups in order to get your clients up and running again? You would ask your clients to provide those backups? Won't look good on you thats for sure.
 
Everything depends on the host. Some hosts prefer doing mirrors on the server as a part of recovery service, they prefer this way as it takes less CPU resources. What we do is FTP the files which takes much less resources than compressing and archiving. Usually every host must do it as the customers require it from them.
 
KurotaTakumi said:
For saving the cost? I believe most hosting provide the backup but not everyone can request to restore at anytime.
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It is not saving costs when a host is already doing this for their own recovery processes.

Like we do daily backups using cpremote to a backup server which we even have the backup server mirrored to another server, but this is for our own piece of mind. We offer clients an option to pay £2 a month for backups, which would allow them to request a copy of their backup or to request us restore a backup. If a client has not taken this option and they want a copy of their backup or an account restored then we will charge a one off fee of £15.
 
For our part, we don't run offsite backups on the server hosting our free plans. We don't mind if you're not able to pay for hosting for whatever reason, but if that is so, then backups are your responsibility!
 
easyhostmedia said:
so you not heard of rSync and cPremote.
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I'll never use for my customers cPremote, it is full of exploits, and the developers if hiding some really bad security problems. We are using RAID10 on our servers, and offsite backup for each account (shared services only) with our scripts using rsync. I really don't trust to use other scripts especially outsourcing where in general (not everybody) they don't really care about security, just about their pockets. Many top web hosting (and this is the most dangerous part) won't tell the truth to the customers that they lost sensitive data by hack attack. So I guess it depends (offsite backing up) by standards of quality of each provider.

Regards
 
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