FAQ's for Backup Plan and Mean Time to Repair
Files and folders that are lost or system failures can cause significant losses and headache for you. Having a contingency plan that works fast and seamlessly is crucial for web business.
Backup plans from E2E Networks safeguard your business by helping to protect the important files your website or application needs. Please find the FAQ’s on our backup plans as below:
Q. Is my server at E2E Networks automatically backed up ?
A. No. Unless you buy a backup plan from us, we don’t backup anything.
Q. Can I maintain my backups on the machine itself ?
A. That is a super-bad idea. If your machine gets corrupted or destroyed due to any reason then these backups are lost as well. This is worse than having no backups at all as it gives you false sense of security and when there is a catastrophe from which data is recoverable, it takes far more time to recover data than from a machine which is not used as a version control system.
Q. But you have RAID-10 or RAID-1 on all your servers which means a mirrored copy of data is always present ? Why do I still need a backup plan ?
A. While mirrored RAID setups are present on all the servers and it can protect against failure of 1 disk at a time but it won’t protect against the following scenarios :-
- Corruption of data due to a security compromise on the machine
- Accidental deletion or corruption of data by someone in your team with access to your primary data stores and database ( say via phpmyadmin )
- A catastrophic hardware failure due to which two or more disks get damaged at the same time, this can make even a RAID-10 un-recoverable.
Incase of a data loss event or hardware failure while we’ll try our best to retrieve your data from failed hardware. Unless you have signed up for a backup plan from us, our responsibility is limited to provide you with equivalent server configuration as soon as possible and if you are maintaining your own backups then help restore them to your server.
Q. What backup plans can I subscribe?
A. You can buy a backup plan at E2E Networks from http://e2enetworks.com/addon-plans/.
Alternatively, you can also choose from 3rd party dedicated backup services like Tarsnap, Barracuda, Rackspace , Zmanda Cloud Backup where you can set up offsite backup for your data.
Q How does the backup at E2E Networks work?
A. At E2E, we offer you a CDP (Continuous Data Protection) backup plans which backup your entire server minus excluded directories as per a backup schedule.
Using CDP, we take a snapshot of the entire filesystem onto the backup server in highly compressed CDP disksafe format. When the CDP agent is run for the first time, it does a complete sync of the system.
Each new backup is incremental for the changes made to your server between current backup and last backup thus speeding up the process and decreasing the load which occurs due to the backup process running on the server.
Q. Are there any particular do’s and dont’s while running CDP Backups?
A. The CDP agent runs on each server you need backed up, if a scheduled backup doesn’t run for any reason the backups fail and the support team at E2E is intimated about the same. The database backup agent which is a part of CDP agent requires full Administrative access to the database servers ( e.g. MS SQL, MySQL ) and if you change the database administrative access without sharing it with E2E Networks via support ticket mentioning that this needs to be fixed on the backup process the database won’t be backed up via CDP Backup plans.
Incase we find that the CDP backup agent has been turned off by a customer repeatedly then we de-provision the backup plan.
Q. How to configure the frequency of backups?
A. You can ask us to configure the frequency of backup or ask for the access of backup control panel where you can manage your backups.
Q. How to restore the backup?
A. You can mail at support@e2enetworks.com to ask the support team to restore any particular backup when you need it.
Q. So is ‘X’ backup plan really a good end in itself ? Do you know your Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) which is acceptable as per your RTB objectives ?
A. Even with backup plans mentioned above being available, the MTTR may be un-acceptable for your RTB (Run The Business) objectives you have in your mind. For instance an innodb dependent MySQL database only 20GB in size might have a MTTR of 4 hours with the best of breed backup systems in place including CDP. Certain NoSQL type datastores can’t be backed up without taking data dump on the disk periodically and then relying on those data dumps or else risk getting in-consistent and corrupt datastore. The only useful way of having a low MTTR with MySQL is to have a passive instance running with multiple instances of time-delayed replication from the Master DB which can help recover incase of data corruption or accidental deletion.
Q. How can E2E Networks help in assessing MTTR for my site?
A. Incase you would like us to do a thorough analysis of risks in your current data protection strategy and identify data at risk due to lack of backup plans or understand how to define RTB objectives better, then please feel free to reach us out at managed-support@e2enetworks.com ( support tokens or hourly support charges may apply if you don’t have a Managed Services plan active with us )
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