In today’s digital economy a reliable Backup and Recovery strategy should be part of your business continuity plan. There are many reasons why you need a backup solution, to name a few server failures, deleting files by mistake, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) corruption and Virus / Malware / Ransomware attack. As we highlighted in our earlier blog, WannaCry ransomware has wreaked havoc on windows computer systems since its first major attack on May 2017. Small businesses were not immune to these attacks; ransomware attacks resulted in the loss of data and weeks of outages. Some website owners/admins neglect the fact that data backup is their responsibility.

At Cirrus Hosting we offer two backup solutions, remote backup and VM backup (Snapshot):

Remote backup plan:  Our Remote Backup plans provide clients with a more value-added service than a traditional backup solution. We provide managed and  near-continuous backup by taking periodical snapshots of a client’s storage and storing each snapshot as a separate restore point. The frequency of restore point creation is determined by each client’s data protection needs. Each plan has a specific amount of backup space and the maximum number of restore points. Having multiple restore points enables you to choose which restore point you would like to use in the case you need to restore your data. Cirrus Tech’s remote backup plans are designed to be easily scalable. All restore points (backups) created are stored on Cirrus Tech’s backup servers running R1Soft. In addition, clients can easily manage their backups through an initiative easy to use web interface.

For more details on our remote backup plans, click HERE.

VM backup: Clients can initiate a manual VM backup or schedule an automatic snapshot to be taken of their VM(s), only a single image can be taken and stored at any given time. VM backup is included in most of our cloud VM Plans free of charge. The advantage of VM backup is that you can convert the backup to an image and built a new server or rebuild your existing one.  Unlike Remote backup plan the VM backups are unmanaged and we do NOT monitor the state of VM backups, there is a chance that a VM backup failure can go unnoticed.

We recommend our clients to take advantage of both remote backup and VM backup solutions at the same time as remote backups are managed and monitored by our technicians, you can have a peace of mind that backups are being taken regularly, you have multiple restore points and your backups are stored on a different hardware than your VM. The VM snapshot is a good solution to easily duplicate your VM or recreate your VM.