Backup
In today's world, your data is key to your business, and protecting your data should be an essential practice. There are a number of key data sources that should be backed up, with copies being kept onsite and offsite.
Data
For Qdos' clients, we try to ensure that in the case of complete server failure the client has an up-to-date copy of all business data quickly available. In general, we will script a data copy to another machine on the network which could be quickly set up to act as a temporary file server. This would significantly reduce the amount of downtime in the case of a server disaster.
Qdos also implement a staged backup system using either tape drives or external esata hard disks to be used for offsite and older data storage. We generally script this backup, although in some cases use Backup Exec to copy all of the data to the device.
Emails
Emails have become a vital part of business in today's hectic environment. It is therefore vital that they are backed up daily and can be easily accessed in case of server failure. Most of out clients use Microsoft servers with Microsoft Exchange as their mail server. Qdos have scripts that create nightly exports of users' mailboxes including emails, calendars, contacts, tasks and stores them in pst format. Additionally we run weekly tasks which makes a copy of the mailbox backups to a different disk on the server. This means that if the disk that holds the original backups fails, we can roll back to the previous week's version of the mailbox.
Shadow Copies
Most of the latest Microsoft operating systems encorporate shadow copies. This means that if a file or folder is accidentally deleted or modified and saved incorrectly, we can revert back to a previous version of the folder which holds the file. We generally save enough snapshots to allow you to go back to versions up to 45 days old.
Fault Tolerance and RAID
Qdos generally use RAID 1 in our managed servers. RAID 1– often called mirroring– means that the server has a duplicate set of hard disks and everything is written twice. In the event of a disk failure, an email alert is sent to us and we can replace the disk and rebuild the mirror but in the meantime the server can continue as usual.
Exchange
There is a nightly backup of Exchange which runs to a different disk on the server from where Exchange is currently hosted. This means that if that disk were to fail or the files became corrupt, we have a nightly copy of the databases from which we could rebuild the Exchange server if necessary.
ASR
Once a month, we run an Automated System Restore backup. This backs up the current system state of the server and means that if we have hardware faults on the server, we can rebuild it from the backups.