Backup and restore overview

Backup is a process that replicates data from your active systems to a different or remote server. Regular or periodic backups are essential to prevent permanent loss of data.

Why you need to back up data

Loss of data can prove expensive in terms of money, time, and effort required to replace it. It is therefore important to preempt contingency situations or events that can compromise availability, by keeping a backup of your content on a secure server.

You can lose data due to a number of reasons:

• Application or system corruption. An application or system locks up or freezes

• Data file corruption. Data appears garbled and unreadable

• Hardware failure. Your hard disk malfunctions

• Intentional damage. Damage to data caused by hackers or viruses

• Natural disasters. Damage caused by fires or other catastrophes

What is backed up

A User backup backs up the following information pertaining to your user account:

• User configuration information

• Files in the site owned by the user

Backup type

When you invoke a backup, WEBppliance takes a full backup of your files, which means, all the files that you own for a particular site are backed up, not only files that have changed. A full backup demands a lot of time and disk space.

Backup format

Backups are created in tar format (a format that combines several files into one) or as a compressed .tgz file (a UNIX compression format). A .tgz compressed backup reduces the file size to approximately 30% of the original file size and thus improves on the time required to take backups.

Restoring data

The process of retrieving data from a backup or archive is called restore. The system uploads the specified files from the backup server to the working directories on your user account.

What you can do using the Backup and Restore option