Off-Site Backups

Backing up website data is vital, not only to protect your investment of time and resources, but also to protect any user data you may have. That’s why at CatN we backup all of our customers data every night to our Amazon S3 storage bucket, which is also stored in a cloud environment, adding redundancy.

We use the EC2 Slave to perform all of our backups to Amazon S3 storage. Using Amazon S3 provides redundancy so that in the case of our local site being damaged we can still recover data from an off site, cloud based storage service.

A backup is an individual customer database dump that is exported (mysqldump), compressed (bz2), encrypted (gpg) before being copied to another location (S3). We take these backups daily, and store each one for 7 days. We also store backups from the 1st of the month for 3 months. This gives us a historic view of individual customer databases.

The backup schedule is as follows:

• Every customer database is dumped on a daily basis.
• Snapshots of the entire CatN filesystem daily.
• User can generate their own backups as often as required.