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Backups Print

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The Arrow Technology backup systems ensure we can go back a significant time for a restore. Our backups make it possible for us to fix most damaged sites with 100% accuracy, without having to necessarily totally revert to an older version of the site.

All successful site attacks that we have ever seen have been due to either vulnerable website frameworks or badly coded site plugins & extensions. If a site is hacked, some site modifications such as to the database may not always be immediately noticed, possibly taking days or even weeks to observe a change. Some attackers deliberately wait a while after a successful attack, so they know there is less chance of a backup being available.

The following backups and related features are included with most Arrow Technology hosting plans:

  • Full website & database mirror copies stored at another data centre; kept for at least 60 days.
  • Automated changed file detection recording. Records are kept for at least 120 days.
  • Full website, database & email backups every 6 hours, stored at both the website data centre and another data centre; kept for 14 days.
  • Every backup is continually monitored & checked, to ensure it is working correctly.
  • Restores are charged on a time basis. Some simple quick to do restores might not be charged at our discretion.
  • Comparison and fixup of damaged sites is charged on a time basis. We provide this service to other hosting companies, so are well experienced with this and can get it done in good time with total accuracy.

Frequently Asked Questions for Backups

If something in your website changes which you do not want to lose, then you should backup. For a rarely changing website you might not have to backup very often and for a busy web store you might want to backup multiple times a day.

It is recommended that you do make a backup of your Arrow Technology hosted website every so often, so that you have your own complete copy of your website. You can do that using either website plugins or your Plesk control panel. If that backup is within your website, you must then copy that backup to another location and delete it from your website.

  • We do not want to be backing up your backups.
  • A backup that is stored within a website should not be considered a safe backup.

We do not recommend that you backup your website every day or even every time there is a change because we do guarantee to keep good website backups. Our backups will be more efficient than yours and probably have a significantly longer history.

For damaged websites we most commonly restore from backups that are at least 10 days old and on many occasions have restored from backups a few weeks old. Many web hosting services do not provide a long enough backup history; many will overwrite the previous backup with each new backup.

Unfortunately, no, they do not. Many web hosting services, even including large providers, do not do any backups at all and a lot of them only do a full backup once a week. Of the ones that do regular backups, very few of them do separate database backups, which is really bad news because databases do require special separate backups.

After infiltrating a website, it is common for attackers to wait days or even weeks before subsequently utilising the website for nefarious purposes or damaging it further. They wait either because the attack is automated and it takes a while for them to get back to your website, or they deliberately want backups to be overwritten with their changes. Those backups will then already contain their changes so that a restore will keep the website infected.

Before any restore is done, it is essential to ascertain when the website was infiltrated.

If your website rarely changes, then a full restore of an uninfiltrated website may be quickest. If your website changes often, such as for an online store, or if you recently made a lot of changes you do not want to lose, our backup systems allow us to compare your website files and database to discover exactly what was changed & when, down to a very accurate level of detail. We have a 100% success rate of fixing up damaged websites and provide this service to other hosting providers.

Before the restored website becomes available to visitors, the vulnerability that allowed the infiltration must be fixed or blocked. Our SiteSentinel system allows us to forensically examine how an attack happened, so that it can be immediately blocked and a proper fix implemented on the website.

If a restore is required due to a software or data issue (and not infiltration by attackers) then it is somewhat easier to choose a suitable backup to restore from.

Assuming your website is 100% secure is not a good idea. You never know when a vulnerability may be discovered, even in website frameworks that have an excellent reputation for good security.

The majority of restores that we do are for sites that were damaged by automatic updates (particularly with WordPress), manual updates by developers that went wrong, or inadvertent admin changes. Often these actions only require a partial restore, although for a website that rarely changes much, a full restore might be quicker.

With appropriate knowledge & experience you can do your own restores from backups that you created. Depending on the reason for the restore you may require more or less knowledge. Any restore should be done with care. If your site was infiltrated then you do need a good understanding of whether a restore is a good idea or not. You can expect a restore to at least leave you with the same vulnerability that caused the issue in the first place, so you must update/upgrade or do whatever is needed to block that vulnerability.

If you want a restore from the Arrow Technology backups then we will have to do it for you. Our backups use a one-way mechanism where the backup servers retrieve files & data from the websites but it is not possible for the website to access the backup. This means that whilst an attacker can change the website, they cannot directly change the backup history. If you require a restore then please submit a support ticket. We can either do a full restore for you or provide you with files and/or databases.

All Arrow Technology web servers have mirrored disks (often referred to as RAID), but mirrored disks are not even close to being the same as backups. Mirrored disks do help protect your data from a disk fault. Disk faults are quite rare.

Nearly all data problems that require a restore are due to website specific issues rather than disks. Disk mirroring will immediately duplicate the same data problem to other disks.

Occasionally it is even possible for multiple mirrored disks to fail at the same time. Replacing a faulty disk raises the chances of another disk failing due to the intensive disk activity during the rebuild of the replaced disk. You do need good backups with a reasonable length of history.

Probably not and some cloud hosts don't even do duplication, despite being called cloud. Most data duplication services make fairly immediate copies of data changes to a separate copy of your data elsewhere, which can be good for redundancy. Those copies might be within seconds or just a few minutes. These services probably do not keep a history of your data, just a copy of whatever data was last changed.

Because nearly all issues that require a restore are due to website faults, failed website updates (often automatic updates), your own website administration accidents, or infiltrations by attackers, this data duplication merely quickly copies those same issues to the other location.

Arrow Technology backups do also duplicate your data to another location, but at longer regular intervals rather than immediate and also with a good history. This allows both fail-over redundancy and the ability to restore from historical backups.

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