UKFast Intelligent Backup

16 March 2010 by The Brigadier

Performing regular server backups is a must for every business that uses online applications for email, databases, websites or ecommerce. Your business cannot afford to lose this vital information.
UKFast’s intelligent backup facility guarantees that all business-critical data is backed up right up to the moment catastrophe strikes, ready to serve again.

UKFast managed backup features:

• Weekly full system state server backup
• Daily incremental server backup, including your system state
• Intelligent, burstable quota starting at 50GB per server and up to 200GB
• Option to choose customised managed backup
• Full management of your server backup solution and completion of the recovery process

How do UKFast’s burstable quotas work?
Your standard backup quota is 50GB and UKFast allows this quota to burst to 200GB. We are enabling you to actually use 300% more space than this. The caveat is that your usage MUST fall below 50GB once in any 14 day period. Should your total usage not fall below this 50GB limit in any given 14 day period, your backups will fail and it will no longer be possible to restore your data. In this situation, your Account Manager will contact you to establish exactly what your required quota is and to discuss how to put this in place.
The intelligent, burstable regime ensures a flexible quota sufficient to provide ongoing and uninterrupted backup for 87% of the UKFast client base.

Customising your backups, it’s the intelligent choice:
Choose a time that suits your server usage – if your quietest time is 4pm, then that’s when we’ll run your backups.

By customising your backups to only include the relevant files and folders, you gain several benefits:

• You will be able to backup ALL files which YOU consider to be mission critical.
• The time taken to complete a backup is significantly reduced – any impact on your server whilst your data is backed up is minimised.
• The time to restore data is significantly reduced – the quicker data can be restored to your server, the sooner you will be online and fully functional.

Top Tips on backups

• Tell UKFast what time is best for you for backups to run to reduce the impact on your server
• Nominate which specific folders and files you wanted to be backed up to ensure your quota is not reached and backups run successfully
• Take a dedicated backup server to increase the flexibility of backup implementation
• Request cross datacentre backup for increased resilience and business continuity

Restrictions and limitations

• Backup is restricted to a weekly retention period.
• Incremental backups are based on time stamps. If you move files into an existing directory or move a whole directory into the backup fileset after a Full backup, those files will probably not be backed up by an Incremental save because they will have old dates.