Retaining backups of your site and its associated databases is a highly-recommended practice, regardless if the data in question is stored by a hosting provider, or on your own computers at home or in your office. Although we recommend that our clients generate and download their own site backups on a fortnightly (bi-weekly) basis, we do maintain comprehensive protocols to ensure backups are conducted and stored, bolstered by a variety of data redundancy systems. Following is an overview:
As data is striped across RAID I pairs, duplicate data is mirrored to each RAID drive
Simply, RAID is a system which uses multiple hard drives to share or replicate data among the drives. Various versions of RAID variously increase data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput and capacity (relative to individual disks). The most common version used by Sketches Plus is RAID 10, itself a combination of RAID 0 (also known as a striped set - which splits data evenly across two or more disks) and RAID 1 (which creates an exact mirror of a set of data on two or more disks). RAID 10 is thus a "stripe of mirrors," providing it with the redundancy advantage of zero data loss even if one drive from each mirrored set completely fails.
Proprietary Data Redundancy Software
The next layer of ensuring data redundancy is a proprietary software-based system utilised across Sketches Plus network. This system helps to ensure the rapid restoration of server data in the event of an extremely unlikely massive server failure.
Control Panel-Based Backups
Each of our default control panel packages provide a facility for backing up all site data, in addition to providing a backup facility for MySQL databases. We highly recommend that, despite our own comprehensive data redundancy / backup practices, that clients ensure they maintain backups of their own, on a fortnightly basis. In addition, backups are usually recommended when upgrading content management software / blogware, or when installing / modifying / upgrading software that utilises MySQL databases.
Automatic Scheduled Backups for All Plans
Sketches Plus performs automatic daily backups on all shared plans. Every seventh day, an additional backup isstored, in addition to one each month. As a result, we retain a daily, weekly and monthly backup of all client data, which can be restored by our technicians upon request and account ownership verification. Moreover, backed up data is always stored on separate servers, completely dedicated to backups.
Server Management
Still another layer of ensuring data redundancy and preventing data loss involves our technicians. server management practices. One example involves server security — ensuring exploits and security holes are rapidly patched helps to prevent data theft or vandalism. Another aspect involves monitoring hard disk and server performance - typically, imminent hardware failures can be detected before data loss occurs.