With the recent threat of Tropical Storm Isaac (soon to be Hurricane Isaac), we evaluated our current disaster recovery plans and realized that our current off-site backups consist of one location which is normally good enough but less than ideal for such important data. To ensure complete redundancy we are now mirroring our backups to a 2nd off-site location. We are utilizing CrashPlan PRO for our 2nd backup method which, instead of syncing nightly like our current backups, will sync up as data is changed for consistent backups of our backups. We are currently backing up over 950GB of data to them but the connection speed seems to fluctuate causing the initial backup to jump between 1Mbps and 30Mbps. This is most likely due to the high encyption we are using (448-bit encryption with a 448-bit custom encyption key to ensure the data cannot be decrypted without our key) so the initial backup is estimated to take another 2 days (currently at 43.4%).
In the event of an emergency, we will attempt to use local backups first, then our primary off-site location, then as a last resort the CrashPlan backups will be use. The restore process from the CrashPlan backups will most likely be a lot slower than the other methods but they will be a guaranteed fallback plan if ever needed.
Right now the only services being backed up are Xen PV, KVM, cPanel Hosting, and a handful of OpenVZ VPSs that opted for weekly backups. We hope that utilizing CrashPlan PRO will allow us to expand our backup methods but at this time we will be using it strictly for a mirrored off-site option.
If you would like more information on our backup methods, CrashPlan, or anything else discussed in this announcement feel free to open a ticket and we will be happy to discuss it with you.
-The Secure Dragon Staff
Monday, August 27, 2012
