How important is a backup service to you?

What features do you look for in a backup service?

How often do you use a backup service?

What would be the ideal backup solution?

The ideal solution for me would be remote storage and full daily backups with possibility to roll the data back to 1 week.
Of course, I need maximum speed of the data transfer to minimize the backup process time.

The ideal solution for me would be remote storage and full daily backups with possibility to roll the data back to 1 week.
Of course, I need maximum speed of the data transfer to minimize the backup process time.

Great input. Are you referring to the restore process when you say "maximum speed of the data transfer"? How important is the ability to "cherry pick" files to be restored?

All depends on your requirements, type of clients, budget, etc.

Everything is doable, but the question is how much of it do you want to do?

15 minute MySQL snapshots? ISCSI mounts? Basic rsync? Incremental? etc etc etc

When I talk about speed, I mean both backup and restore speed.
'Cherry pickup' is a 'nice to have' feature, but I think its less relevant for the Web server, since the developer usually have a local copy of the files (or SVN/CVS)
Most important - being able to revert back your server fast in case of failure.

Backup service is important for me, I have tons of files, would hate to lose all files and never see them again. I perfer backups to be taking every end of the week around every Wensday around 12pm. Its important.

How important is a backup service to you? Absolutely critical. If you're in the hosting industry, in any capacity, and you're not running at least one level of backups, sell your clients and move on. Even if you publicly acknowledge lack of backups and your clients are aware of it, regardless of who's responsibility it is to maintain backups, the moment you have your first catastrophe is the moment your clients realize they need a host who has backups - and you're out of business, and your clients suffer as a result. Bottom line - don't operate without backups, at least in a shared/reseller environment (VPS/dedicated customers can purchase them too, but you're more hands off when it comes to these).

What features do you look for in a backup service? Speed and the ability to customize your backup routine.

How often do you use a backup service?Daily onsite, three times per week offsite, with weekly and monthly archives for both.

What would be the ideal backup solution?We use R1Soft onsite for our servers, and we run 6 days of incremental backups. Offsite, we use BQBackup, rsync and some intelligent data design to keep storage optimal and running smooth.

What would make this even better would be if we had a separate onsite server (or perhaps even extra hard drives in our servers) - moved backups onto these as a holding area and then pushed these down to our backup destinations. That would cut down backup times quite a bit. Note to self...

Agree with the above, even if clients don't recognize the need (until a problem happens to them).

Our primary hosting server is linux/plesk at SoftLayer DC. It is RAID 1 (so there is the first level of "backup").

From inception we've been doing a full server remote backup to eVault at SoftLayer Dallas. Retention period is for 7 days (so, can restore from any of prior 7 days).

Recently we added our own dedicated RAID 1 backup server running R1Soft linux and MySQL plug-in onsite at SoftLayer DC (for speed of recovery). Backups every 15 minutes + restore points for each of prior 5 days).

It is somewhat amazing to see the 15 minute backups in action.

gck

Our primary hosting server is linux/plesk at SoftLayer DC. It is RAID 1 (so there is the first level of "backup").Bah, I forgot to mention RAID. Technically, it is a level of backup, though you can't treat it as such, because it will only protect you from certain types of hardware failure.

There is absolutely no excuse for running a customer/production server without RAID of some sort - at least 1, if not 5 or 10. It's an insurance policy no host can afford to ignore on their boxes, IMHO.