Backups

Anchor offers three different options for backing up your critical data to protect your business:

1. Daily offsite tape backup
2. Daily onsite backup to drive array
3. Monthly offsite data archiving

The three options allow you to choose the solution that’s most appropriate to your needs and budget.

Why use a backup service?

You get the peace of mind that comes with knowing your data is safe. You’re guaranteed that in the event of hardware failure, accidental deletion, malicious damage, file corruption or catastrophic events you can access a copy of your data.
The backup solutions are incredibly cost effective when compared to the costs associated with implementing your own backup system. 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 scale backup system which amalgamates the requirements of many users whilst still maintaining the privacy of data.
Backup systems are configured to automatically copy your data onto remote storage systems where the data either remains or is spooled on to tape systems.
The backup system operates on an independent internal network (not accessible via the Internet) to ensure security and performance. The backup service is monitored 24 × 7.

Backup options

Daily offsite tape backup

This service ensures that a copy of your data is stored offsite on a daily basis. Your data is copied over the network to a tape system automatically.
The backup system performs a combination of incremental and full system backups. Depending on the nature of the data set the most efficient combination of full and incremental backups is adopted with a full backup typically occurring ever 3-5 days.
The tape rotation scheme allows data to be restored data to the state it was in up to 7 days prior.
Whilst you gain the additional security of having your data offsite, restoration from tape is inherently time consuming. This service is geared towards recovering from disaster situations.

Daily onsite backups to disk array

A large drive array is operated that provides you with space to store your data on a remote secure system.
You can choose to have your data automatically copied each day by Anchor or maintain the flexibility of controlling what data is backed up yourself.
In the event that you need access to your backups this system provides much faster access than data stored on tape and offers you the capacity to access it any time.

Monthly offsite data archiving

In addition to regular backups Anchor can take a snapshot of your data on a monthly basis and store it in a secure offsite location.
Your data will be written to tape which is only used once and is kept indefinitely. Alternately this tape can be shipped to a location of your choosing for added piece of mind.
This system allows you to recover data that existed on your system a long into the future.

Amanda backup agent, suitable for:

• Daily offsite tape backups of Linux servers
• Data archiving of Linux servers

A client agent (Amanda) is installed on each server that is to be backed up. Configuration occurs either by Anchor or the client.

Amanda compresses all data on the client server before transmitting it to the backup server.

Amanda automatically schedules either a full or incremental backup to occur each day.

Databases are dumped to the file system prior to the commencement of the backup process to ensure data is backed up in a consistent state. Depending on database size up to 3 copies of databases are maintained on the local file system.

Disk image, suitable for:

• Daily offsite tape backups of Windows Servers
• Data archiving of Windows servers
• Onsite backup of Windows servers

A disk image of the server is created locally first using NT Backup. The image is copied to be backup server via a network file share. The data is then copied on to tape.
Database dumps are performed using MS SQL maintenance plan to ensure data is backed up in a consistent state.

FTP/Rsync, suitable for:

• Daily offsite tape backups of Windows and Linux servers
• Data archiving of Windows and Linux servers
• Onsite backup of Windows and Linux servers

A user account is provided on the backup server. The client is able to use ftp or rsync to copy data to or from the server at any time. Any data stored on the backup server during the backup window is copied to tape each day.
The client is responsible for ensuring the data to be backed up has been copied to the server each day.

Speed

100 Mbps