Disclaimer: MageHost has joined forces with Savvii. Therefore, these articles are only relevant to existing MageHost customers. For more information on this, visit www.savvii.com/en/magehost.  


When running an online business, backups are very important to be able to recover from any type of data loss disaster. This is why we encourage our customers to easily create their backups through running our scripts. Be sure to read our Knowledge Base articles about creating and restoring your own backups:


 

However, as a hosting company, MageHost has to make sure that when any type of disaster strikes our infrastructure, we are able to restore all data. Below is what MageHost does to minimize data loss when an incident would happen.

 

Local Backups

We support a retention of one week. Every night around 01:00h a backup will be made of the complete server. This backup is split up in to several parts.


  • All important files of the servers' OS are being stored in a backup in separate files. 
  • All home directories of our customers are being stored in a backup in separate files
  • A MySQL dump is created of each database


All file backups are being done with an incremental setup. This means there will be a full backup made on 1 day during the week. The rest of the week only files which are newer/different will be put in the daily backup. When a week has passed a new full backup will be created. When this new backup was successful, the old backup will be deleted from the hosting server. 


Encryption

All our backups are encrypted during creation (so while being stored on disk) using GPG with a private key. This private key is unique for each server and is only stored on that particular server itself. A passphrase for decrypting is needed and these are only accessible by MageHost engineers.


Offsite Backups

MageHost has a number of high volume storage servers in a separate offsite datacenter, BIT-1, which is 500 meters away from BIT-2C (https://www.bit.nl/nl/datacenters/algemeen-datacenters). We have a private 10 Gbps dark fiber connection between these locations and these dedicated storage servers are only reachable through our private network.


The servers in BIT-1 copy the encrypted backups daily from the servers in BIT-2C, but do not have the private key or passphrase needed to decrypt these backups. 


These offsite backupservers keep the files for 14 days