news website backup infrastructure

As you may have heard, an Australian hosting provider has made the news recently after thousands of its customer web sites were lost as a result of a particularly malicious security breach.

In response, some of our clients have asked us how we manage our backups and what steps we have taken to ensure customer sites are safe.

With the help of our hosting partners and a combination of online and offline backups, our infrastructure provides a staggering four levels of backups. So even if three copies fail, your data is still safe.

syn-rg’s backup infrastructure is outlined below:

1. RAID

RAID involves multiple hard drives with multiple copies of data. If one drive fails, the other picks up the slack.

2. Primary Backup

This is a backup taken at regular intervals of every web site, database and virtual server. The backup is located on a dedicated backup server that is securely separated from our standard hosting servers. If you need a database backup restored from last week or a month ago, this is where we will retrieve the backup for you, free of charge.

3. Secondary Backup

This is a backup of level 2, again located on separate dedicated storage device. All backups here are compressed and encrypted, ready for level 4.

4. Offline Backup

This is the clincher that makes the whole backup system foolproof. The level 3 backup is rotated regularly and taken offsite to a secure facility. These backups are offline (powered off) and unplugged from the internet at all times.