Retaining backups of your site and its associated databases is a highly-recommended practice, regardless if the data in question is stored by a hosting provider, or on your own computers at home or in your office. Although we recommend that our clients generate and download their own site backups on a fortnightly (bi-weekly) basis, we do maintain comprehensive protocols to ensure backups are conducted and stored, bolstered by a variety of data redundancy systems. Following is an overview:

High-end Hard Disks and RAID Configurations

The core of any data redundancy plan involves ensuring hardware failure does not cause data loss. Consistent across all shared, reseller and VPS systems on the Net Logistics network are Seagate Cheetah® 15,000 RPM SCSI hard disks. Not only do these drives individually ensure top performance and reliability, combined with hardware RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) 10, we eke out still faster data access while maximizing redundancy.

Simply, RAID is a system which uses multiple hard drives to share or replicate data among the drives. Various versions of RAID variously increase data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput and capacity (relative to individual disks). The most common version used by Net Logistics is RAID 10, itself a combination of RAID 0 (also known as a striped set - which splits data evenly across two or more disks) and RAID 1 (which creates an exact mirror of a set of data on two or more disks). RAID 10 is thus a "stripe of mirrors," providing it with the redundancy advantage of zero data loss even if one drive from each mirrored set completely fails.

Proprietary Data Redundancy Software

The next layer of ensuring data redundancy is a proprietary software-based system utilized across Net Logistics. network. This system helps to ensure the rapid restoration of server data in the event of an extremely unlikely massive server failure.

All Shared & Reseller Plans Net Logistics performs automatic daily backups on all shared and reseller plans. Every seventh day, an additional backup is stored, in addition to one each month. As a result, we retain a daily, weekly and monthly backup of all client data, which can be restored by our technicians upon request and account ownership verification. Moreover, backed up data is always stored on separate servers, completely dedicated to backups. All VPS Plans Backups of VPS drive images are also conducted daily, ensuring that all of our VPS clients can rest secure knowing their data is consistently protected. Additional backup space, for individual account backup (rather than complete-drive-image backups) can be leased for an additional monthly fee. Contact our Sales Department for more information. Dedicated Servers A very wide range of backup options are available for our dedicated server clients, including backup drives, utilization of our backup servers, various RAID configurations, customized backup schedules, and so on. You may contact our sales department for more information.

Server Management

Still another layer of ensuring data redundancy and preventing data loss involves our technicians. server management practices. One example involves server security — ensuring exploits and security holes are rapidly patched helps to prevent data theft or vandalism. Another aspect involves monitoring hard disk and server performance — typically, imminent hardware failures can be detected before data loss occurs.

Control Panel-Based Backups

Each of our default control panel packages provide a facility for backing up all site data, in addition to providing a backup facility for MySQL databases. We highly recommend that, despite our own comprehensive data redundancy / backup practices, that clients ensure they maintain backups of their own, on a fortnightly basis. In addition, backups are usually recommended when upgrading content management software/blogware, or when installing/modifying/upgrading software that utilizes MySQL databases.