While most all web hosting providers, including mine, have a provision in their AUP or TOS that says that you, the consumer, are responsibility for backing up your data, I believe that as a service provider I owe it to my customers to do all that I can to protect their data. Backing up customer data both internally and off site is really the only way to fully mitigate potential disaster as the unfortunate folks that run their business out of The Planet's H1 data center in Houston, Texas discovered when there was a large explosion in the electrical room that took the center off line for more than a week. While The Planet staff from the top down worked 24/7 to get the center back online, the update page tells the story of how difficult a task they had before them. During the downtime I followed the frustration of many whose data was held in powerless servers with no off site backup, were without a web presence, email and other services that make any hosting service's world turn.

So, what do does Wright PC Consulting, LLC do to protect consumer data? Here is our current backup formula. While not perfect, it provides a pretty reasonable level of safety.

1. At approx. 3AM the cPanel backup script, cpbackup, runs an incremental backup of all customers' home directories and cPanel configuration files and saves them to a dedicated backup drive where they are archived and rotated monthly.


2. When cpbackup has completed its backup, it starts a second script that "mirrors" the backup drive and sends it to a data center in another state through a secure encrypted tunnel using the rsync protocol.


3. Monthly customer data is burned to DVD and stored in a third, secure location.


4. For added security and by special arrangement, we will also mirror a customer's email off site every hour.

These steps have proven to not only ease customer anxiety, but make they make restoring data, from a single file to any entire account easy.