Doing backups of your virtual server is of the utmost importance!

2018-12-06

Product updates: announcing our improved backup service for ColossusCloud!

Jonathan - Engineering

We are so proud to finally make this new system available to all customers of ColossusCloud at all of our six data centers!

This is a project we've been working on for a long time in order to reliably do daily backups (also known as snapshots) of your virtual servers, and it replaces an older system that was slower and less efficient.

Two new backup plans are now available to all customers, for a small fee.

  • Plan 1 stores the last 4 days of backups, at a cost of only 20% of the base price of your virtual server (that is, the price for CPU, RAM and disk resources). So, if your virtual server is $5/mo, then this plan costs only $1/mo.
  • Plan 2 stores the last 30 days of backups, at a cost of only 40% of the base price of your virtual server. This is highly recommended because, if for example, you accidentally delete data, and you don't notice for several days or weeks, this plan will allow you to get it back.

Some of the features of this new system are:

  • Based on commercial software.
  • Backups are now stored in a separate cluster of servers, completely unrelated to Ceph.
  • It can create incremental backups of a virtual server within just a minute or two.
  • Restoring a backup of a virtual server is much faster now.
  • If the original virtual server is offline (for example, due to a failure of Ceph), your virtual server's backup will be restored to a new Ceph cluster.
  • Allows for creating new virtual servers from your existing backups.
  • Allows also for creating new virtual servers from your existing backups in a region different from the original backup.

More features are being planned and worked on. If you have any suggestions, please let us know!

Be aware that the older backup plans are now phased out. If you had any backup plan enabled, we have transitioned you to at least the Plan 1 mentioned above. We recommend clients with very critical data to upgrade to Plan 2.

We also recommend you read some of the following articles related to protecting your data, even if you have one of our backup plans:

Dump your SQL database to Dropbox/Box/Resilio

Please, enable our backup service. Your data is never 100% safe!