Online backup service

An online backup service is run in the Anchor co-location facility that allows you to backup your server on a daily basis (including offsite tape rotation) without the cost of purchasing and operating backup drives and tape libraries.

The service operates from a large online drive array. The entire drive array is backed up to tape on a daily basis with tapes rotated offsite.

Why use the backup service?

The backup service provides a full backup of your server every day. This ensures that in the event of hardware failure or catastrophic events such as fire in the data centre your data is protected.

This a completely managed service.

You save on equipment purchase costs, you no longer need to purchase backup drives or costly tape libraries.

You save on running costs, you no longer need to pay for co-location of backup drives, and daily tape rotations. You don't need to worry about ensuring your backups work each day or installing and running backup applications.

The backup service is flexible and scalable. You pay only for the volume of data you backup. If your requirements are rapidly changing or you're starting off small but know you are going to grow, our backup solution is perfect for you.

How it works

We operate a large drive array running RAID (additional drives for redundancy protecting against data loss in the event of individual drive failure) for you to store your data on. This drive array operates on an independent internal network (not accessible via the Internet) to ensure security and performance. The backup service is monitored 24 x 7.

An application called Amanda runs the backup server and a client application is available for installation on your server.

There is an allocated backup window in the early hours of the morning when your server will copy all required data to the backup service. During the day the contents of the drive array is copied on to tape.

Tape Rotation scheme

The tape rotation scheme is designed to provide a reliable means of recovering from a disaster situation (eg both hard drives in a server fail simultaneously, the server is destroyed, large volumes of data are lost through accidental deletion or malicious activity). It is not designed to provide a high level of incremental backups for frequent changes to client code or applications.

Local backup or revision control systems should always be used to provide a backup of code sources for hosted applications.

The tape rotation scheme is an incremental backup Monday to Friday. Once per week a full backup is scheduled and performed. Tapes are rotated Monday-Friday. Tape changes do not occur on weekends and public holidays.

In the event that you do lose data the backup service can provide you a copy of your data for the last week.

Requirements

As the backup service operates on an independent network you server must be configured with at least 2 network cards (one free network port).

To ensure your data is backed up correctly all data must be transferred within the allocated backup window. You will be advised the exact period when your service is provisioned.

If your server runs on a Microsoft operating system you will need to configure it to copy the required data onto the server via FTP.

Data restoration

In the event that data is required to be restored two options are available. At any time you can access the most recent backup from the drive array via ftp without assistance. If the data required must be restored from tape a support request must be lodged and a list of the available backups will be provided. Restoration of data from tape is a time consuming process and may take up to 4 hours to complete.

Service pricing?

Backups are charged based on 1GB increments/day up to 5GB. For 5GB or more of data backups are charged based on 10GB increments.

The setup fee includes cabling of the additional network connection.

In the event that you require data to recovered from tape, charges apply.

Please refer to the Co-location price guide for setup and ongoing charges.