The Problems:

Anything that happens to your server happens to your business. If your server is down, are you financially prepare to lose, say, a month's worth of income when people cancel recurring subscriptions? Anyone who owns or manages a web site is concerned about hackers. Malicious people with nothing better to do but sit around and corrupt your server have been creating headaches for the rest of us for ages. What if a hacker gets access to your server? How much damage could be done with the click of a button? Or worse, what if your hosting center caught fire, as the Planet did, taking out 6,000 servers? If the datacenter was flooded and whole physical box was destroyed? How much down-time would occur while a new machine was put together from scratch and everything re-installed? Could you EVER recover your databases? How much revenue would be lost? How many times have we accidentally deleted or changed something that we shouldn't have and wished we could go back in time to retrieve a file from yesterday, last week, or last month? Uploaded an old copy of a password file? What if your host goes out of business and leaves you high and dry? What if your hard drive dies or memory fails, corrupting the system? Are you prepared to handle these events when they transpire? (Because they WILL!)

Proposed Solutions:

(and why they're inadequate)

I have a copy on my local machine
Some webmasters are content with tape drives or keeping a copy of just their website files on their local machine, neglecting the database, file permissions, and third-party configurations, such as credit card processing and feed-providers. How long would it take to rebuild a site from these back-ups? How much money is lost while this is taking place? How many customers did you lose?

My host handles back-ups
Many rely on their host when it comes to server maintainance, back-ups, and disaster recovery. Have you checked with your host regarding what precautions they have in place and actually tested their back to make sure you can actually recover a file from a week ago? Very few hosts provide full incremental back up.

RAID
RAID protects only against physcial hardware failure of the hard drive. It does not protect you against data corruption due to a bug in a script, accidentally deleting stuff, natural disaster, hackers, etc. Because RAID protects against just one out of dozens of possible problems, it will cover you about a small percentage of the problems, but leaves your business completely vulnerable to most of the major threats that can do real damage.

The Solution: Clonebox

A proper back-up strategy has long been considered vital for use in disaster recovery. With Clonebox, the disaster is averted entirely, providing you with disaster prevention, as your site is never down. Clonebox is a live spare server, an identical copy of your main server, which fills two roles. First, it stands by ready to automatically take over should your main server be unavailable for any reason. In case of a hardware failure, network outage, a hacker taking down the server, etc. Clonebox will detect that and start serving up the sites, so your members may never know there was ever a problem.

Secondly, Clonebox serves the role of a top of the line off site incremental back-up. If you or one of your people accidentally deleted some files, such as by running "rm" while in the wrong directory, a cracker messed with your stuff, a database was corrupted by a bad drive sector, or you had complete hardware failure Clonebox would come to the rescue with four complete copies of your server. We provide server images from last night, yesterday, last week, and last month. This is important because we often talk to people who thought they had "a complete back-up system", only to find out that they had only one back-up copy, and that copy was made ten minutes AFTER the cracker deleted the member database, so they have no usable back-up. Keeping four copies from different times prevents that problem of just having two copies of the same garbage.

We also hear from people who thought they had a good back up just because they had all of their HTML files and content, but then discover that wasn't enough. An example was when Netpond called us when their board crashed. The MySQL database had gotten corrupted, so back-ups of the scripts and HTML did them no good. Clonebox creates a perfect copy of the WHOLE server, databases, email aliases, logs needed to investigate a break in, etc. Clonebox is affordably priced based on the amount of disk space duplicated.