Infrastructure
Data protection & disaster recovery
What protects your data when software fails, a hard disk dies, or a site is hit by hacking or a virus.
Data protection
Three things stand between a failure and lost data
RAID hardware
Every write goes to more than one hard disk at the same time. If a disk fails, the server keeps running from the copy on the others.
Weekly account and server backups
Scripts keep copies of all important files and folders on a regular pre-defined interval, so a server can be restored after a total failure.
Your own backup policy manager
On web hosting packages, a web-based wizard where you set the backup scope, the frequency and the backlogs yourself.
Data is the lifeblood of most companies today, and organisations increasingly expect it to be online and reachable at all times. The protections below exist so that a software malfunction, a system failure, or data lost to hacking or a virus does not become permanent.
How RAID handles a disk failure
We use RAID hardware to protect the data on the server against hard-disk failures. It works by creating a mirror of all data on more than one hard disk automatically, without any delay: all data is written to multiple hard disks simultaneously. If a hard disk fails, that disk is marked as deactivated and the system carries on as though nothing had happened, using the copy of the data on the other hard disk or disks. You do not have to change anything or make special code modifications in your website or web application for this to work.
That is a significant advantage over a non-RAID system, both for protecting the data and for keeping the service running, because the system continues to function in case of a disk failure. RAID also improves the performance of the various services on the server marginally.