World Backup Day: the importance of data protection

World Backup Day comes on the eve of April fools. Preceding a day all about jokes, pranks, and laughs, the 31st instead asks us to get serious about backups and redundancy. Today is a day to remind ourselves how critical the information age has rendered our data in our daily lives. Whether for business, database management or storing treasured memories, backups have become a non-optional solution to permanence in an age where nothing is set in stone.

The word “backup” has also evolved. World Backup Day started with a small group of redditors, who called for a day to raise awareness about keeping your data safe. Those days are long gone. We now work from an ever growing list of remote devices on an ever growing list of technologies and products. The data protection solutions and approaches of the 2010’s don’t cut it anymore. World Backup Day has had to evolve along, and now covers everything from redundancy to cyber protection, along with backups of course. So how can we best approach the technology, security requirements, and cost of backups today?

Creating real backups

As a hosting provider we see backups and redundancy as a mission critical part of everyday life. Fundamentally a backup is only truly a backup if it can always be restored. We tackle this issue with our tools and services. Specifically how they relate to monitoring and node redundancy.  Whenever a node is added into our monitoring system (because it isn’t performing as it should), a new node, based on the latest backup, is set up. This has several effects on the redundancy of our backup system;

• It functions as a continuously automated verification that our backups are not only made, but can also be restored.
• It prevents any blockage or barrier to backup availability.

This approach is unfortunately not as common as you would hope. Many companies, while making backups readily available, do not frequently test them. The risks are clear. In cases where a backup is desperately needed, there is no guarantee that it will work. While these risks are not everyday occurrences, being able to be certain of the safety of your data is preferred to running any additional risk, every second of every day.

Browsing your backups

We rarely use the new node. The original one almost never breaks. Surprisingly most use cases actually have to do with either user error, or someone wanting to see their old files, for a variety of reasons. To facilitate this a temporary disk is attached to your node automatically. This means if you do happen to take a look at your backup you can browse the entire disk. You get an additional disk attached to your node which is in a state as it was exactly when the backup was made. It also runs a completely separate database instance from this disk so that you can browse your records as if you would at the time of backup creation.

All of this happens without utilizing the resources of your production systems. The backup disk is a separate disk. Due to that, there is no impact on your production disk when attaching a backup. The second MySQL instance is also CPU-niced, therefore the production services have priority on compute time.

All Hypernode customers can attach backups independently without additional support. In most cases the latest backup can be attached, however for SLA Standard customers older backups can be attached too. Using SSH you can run a simple command-line tool in order to select and attach your preferred backup.

World Backup Day gift

We realize the importance of backups for the security of your data is important, not just to SLA Standard customers. SLA Basic customers could already use our paid services to attach an older backup as well. However, especially for World Backup Day, we have decreased the price to do so from 100 euros to 25 euros. Happy World Backup Day!

Before we get ready for April fools and enjoy a day of pranks, hijinks and amusing antics it is a good idea to reinforce that backups are serious business. Make sure you have backups and just as importantly, make sure they are reliable. Hypernode clearly offers much more than these two features when it comes to ensuring the safety and redundancy of your data, which you can find in our backup policy.