I’m in the cloud, do I still need to back up my servers?
Hosting your websites and applications within the cloud is definitely an honest move for any business – it helps you to scale back your prices and provides you with advantages that you simply will solely dream of with the other web hosting platform. Several cloud platforms claim up-time rates of 100% and therefore the promise of zero data loss and these techniques have meant that their plan of performing backups has fallen by the edge for several service users. Therefore we’re here to answer the question on whether or not you ought to still perform your own backups, even though your data is held within the cloud.
Any smart cloud supplier can take regular backups of their cloud environment in order that if a ruinous event will occur that wipes out VMs fully, they will be fixed up quickly to minimise service disruption. However, this simply accounts for VMs as an entire and doesn’t account for the individual files hosted on a VM that are liable for becoming corrupted on their own.
Performing direct backups of the info hosted on your VM is your responsibility and not one thing that your cloud supplier can take responsibility of, therefore if information on your server will become corrupt then the sole method of convalescent it’s to revive the entire VM image and this might wipe out different information that has been recorded since the backup date.
By taking your own direct backups of the data hosted on your cloud servers, you’ve got the ability to quickly and with efficiency restore corrupt files on an individual basis while not having to incur the time period that you simply would face with a VM-wide restoration.
The methods that you simply use to require backups of your data are going to differ depending on your choice of operating system. Windows contains a typical backup tool which will be sufficient for the bulk of scenarios, while UNIX users might favor to use AN application like Rsync to fulfil their needs. In any case it’s counseled that you simply transfer your backups to a remote location so as to ensure their effectiveness within the event of server failure or file corruption.
So in brief, the solution is yes, you are doing ought to have an online backup plan of your servers yourself, even though your cloud provider will take backups of individual VMs. Data security and protection isn’t one thing that you should rely on others to provide, rather you ought to see the steps taken by your cloud provider as a second line of defence and your own backups being the primary line.