Backup Snapshots

The Backup Snapshot Service (Beta)

The Backup Snapshot Service makes daily backups of all files available instantaniously in a special directory on every VPS. The snapshots are stored on a physically separate server and are therefore not succeptible to media failure on the hosting server, providing an additional layer of protection of the client data.

How it Works

Every VPS has a read-only /snapshot directory. This directory contains subdirectories named 0, 1 and 2. 0 contains most recent files, 1 will be one day older than 0, etc. Restoring a lost/corrupt file is as simple as copying it from the /snapshot tree. (The actual number of days available may vary depending on our backup server disk space, but we expect to be able to have at least 2 days).

Some Important Notes

Backup snapshots will only contain user files, i.e. files created by you. Any files that were originally part of your system when it was first provisioned (all binaries and libs, etc.) are not part of the snapshots.

Snapshots are performed daily, however there is no specific time of day at which we would expect the actual snapshot to take place. We process all of our servers in sequence and the actual time of your snapshot will fall somewhere within a 24-hour period and will likely happen at approximately (but not exactly) same time of day.

Note that snapshots are performed by copying files without consideration for the file state. This means that files that are continuously updated by long-running proceses such as database servers may not be in a consistent state at the time of copy.