Solution · By task

Downtime protection

Something will break, without question; it is all about readiness. We answer three things in advance: how long the company will be down, how much data will be lost and who does what in the first thirty minutes. All the hardware is then chosen to fit those three answers.

3-2-1
the rule of three copies
Monthly
a test restore of the archive
24/7
monitoring with alerts
The plan
for the day of an outage

What it is built from

Six parts. The first is entirely about the calculations; the other five are assembled to fit the numbers, not the other way round.

Discuss the risks

We calculate the acceptable losses

For every system we record two numbers: the acceptable outage and the acceptable data loss. Everything else follows from them.

Data backup

A schedule, version retention, an off-site copy and a monthly attempt to restore the archive on a separate environment.

Monitoring

We watch the machines, the links, free space and services. The alert reaches us before it reaches your staff.

Spare connectivity

A backup link with a different provider and automatic failover. For retail and warehousing this is mandatory.

Power and spare parts

UPS units that shut the servers down cleanly, a stock of critical spares and extended warranty on the key components.

The procedure

The document for the day of an outage: the sequence of steps, the names of those responsible, phone numbers and the order in which systems come back up.

What we defend against

The five most common scenarios. Each has its own defence, and one cannot substitute for another.

A disk or a server died

Backups and a stock of spares save you. It happens more often than anything else and recovers more predictably.

Ransomware

An offline archive saves you. It finds ordinary backups and destroys them along with the original, which is why you need a copy with separate access.

Someone deleted too much

Deep version retention saves you. The loss is noticed weeks later, so yesterday's backup is not enough.

The provider dropped the link

A second provider saves you. Two links from the same provider usually follow the same route and die together.

The power went out

A UPS with a clean shutdown saves you. A sudden loss of power harms the database more than the outage itself.

A backup only becomes a backup once you have managed to restore it. In our experience about one client in three has a «configured» scheme that does not come back up: the job has been failing for months, the wrong folder is being copied, or the archive is locked with a password nobody remembers. Checking takes one day.

Questions and answers

The question is not whether you have backups but when you last restored one and how long it took. Start with a test: we take your copy, bring it up on a separate environment and time it. The result either confirms the scheme or shows the weak point, and both are useful.

It depends on the numbers you need. Coming back up within a working day is inexpensive; within an hour is noticeably dearer, because it needs a second site on hot standby. So the first thing we calculate is the acceptable downtime: usually it turns out half the systems are fine with the cheap scheme.

We do, under contract and within the stated deadlines. The procedure is written so that your own person could follow it if our engineer is unavailable. The document is kept by you.

Yes, that is exactly what the test restore is for. Every month we bring the archive up on a separate environment with a stopwatch running. Once a year it is worth staging a drill with your staff: it shows at once where the paperwork parts ways with reality.

Let us check whether you are ready for an outage

Разберём вашу схему копирования, попробуем поднять архив и замерим настоящее время подъёма каждой системы.