Back-ups?

[vonbrocklin]

I hate to beat a dead horse, but I am confused about the back-ups done by Matrix. In a previous thread, admin clarified that back-ups were done to EVERYTHING and that items could typically be recovered in 1-2 hours for a fee of $60 per hour. (see here). This thread was greatly comforting to me.

But have the back-ups ever been tested in a real-life scenario? I am only asking because of the troubles reported by ramjet, and because of some notorious experiences with so-called back-ups at other hosting companies. Maybe we are missing some of the private details, but publically it appears that:

a. ramjet lost his CP, his websites, everything...probably due to a PSoft bug. (see here)

b. three days later, no back-ups were in place although Matrix said they were "looking into it" (see here - halfway down)

c. one week later, ramjet posts another message that still nothing has been restored from back-up (see here)

I am hoping that ramjets situation was truly unique, in that his entire control panel was deleted along with all of his H-Sphere info. But needless to say, this has me very nervous. Thankfully ramjet only had one live site, but many of us host dozens or even hundreds of domains. So I feel compelled to ask: has the back-up system ever been tested? I have no doubt you are backing up data, but that is the easy part of the equation. Recovery is a whole other story. Have any of you ever had anything successfully restored from back-up? I am tempted to delete one of my own sites and pay the $60/hr just to see what happens.

vonbrocklin

p.s. admin, I am starting to feel like I am picking on you guys but that is truly not my intention. :-) I know you guys are working your asses off, and that this can be a hard business. I just need to know if your back-ups actaully work, and if it is true that they can be restored with 1-2 hours of labor. If ramjet is a unique case, let us know. I tried to ask some of these questions in other threads but did not get any responses.

[BCS]

Would also like clarification on the cost.
I mentioned this in a previous post but no reply was made (same as the first link vonbrocklin provided): http://support.vortechhosting.com/de...php?article=47
leaves the impression that backups are actually free

that page is a little misleading I wil metion it to admin. If we mess seomthing up its free. You mess it up its 60.00 per hour. Wea re constantly working to make our backups better. Psoft has thrown us some real curve balls lately and I know that has affected some backup files that shoul dhave been easily fixed but were instead unusable. I am working with psfot to make sure that we can restore from backups with no problems.

[jammin]

This is exactly why I asked the question of whether databases were properly backed up. ie. just pointing a tape backup system at a microsoft sql server and backing up the file system does *not* give you something you can restore. You need to properly back up the actual databases as well, either by scheduling a backup to disk (which is then backed up to tape) or using a specialised backup agent.

I doubt that if I deleted a mssql database and asked for it to be restored, it would be possible. I too have been tempted to try it and pay the $60 an hour to confirm this

Now with ramjet's problem, that is a different story. If he lost domains etc that would have been caused by an h-sphere software bug (or whatever) scrambling records in the h-sphere database. The only way to recover the CP information would be to restore the whole database, effectively overwriting any recent config changed that all of the rest of us have made. This would obviously not be acceptable. Backing up the CP database is only of use if the whole thing gets blatted or corrupted.

H-sphere restoring is made doubly difficult by the fact that hsphere maintains a database of things such as DNS records, mail accounts etc, and also writes out changes to third party applications. I imagine it would be very hard to keep these in synch after a restore - ie. the CP might say you have a mail account set up, but the mail server itself (qmail) might not. Now that I think about it this could be causing a mail problem I have.....!

Of course ramjets web sites (files) should have been restorable, and if due to an hsphere or psoft error should have been restored for free.

How would matrix feel about us (resellers) randomly picking a database of each type, a windows web, unix web, and whatever else we can come up with to delete, and have them restored as a test? As vonbrocklin says, this would be a required test of any backup policy in a company IT department.

Jammin

I'm a Windows/MSSQL reseller, I'll volunteer to sacrifice a site and database for testing.

[mresell]

My understanding is that many sysadmins back up the hsphere partition about every 1-2hrs because if something gets corrupted etc...(which we all know can easily happen due to their current program design and upgrade policies) then the whole thing will most likely have to be installed..which is not pretty. Obviously w/ recent probs this is important to have that "peace of mind"

[ramjet]

Here is the explanation proffered me...
Now for the bigger problem. Due to the time lapse, I was unable to save your site info from the backups. The problem there is that on Sept. 24 we also installed a new backup system. This means the old backup system was switched from Windows to FreeBSD, to make the server more stable. Since we installed the new OS on the 24th there was no backups on the server, since it was wiped clean due to the new installation. If I could have gotten to the backups in time on the local server I could have saved them but I missed that time..
I feel that I accept this as a one off error and that Matrix is working hard to make things better, indeed hopefully my problem was CAUSED by the fact that they have already made things better!!

[admin]

We also have anther 1.4TB backup server coming online very soon so that will make backups even better.

[somereseller]

Hint : http://www.arkeia.com/download.html