In short, we provide the facility to take backups free of charge, but we do not manage this facility for you.
When you purchase a Flexible Resource pool you will be allocated a standard 50GB of snapshot storage. You can set up your servers to automatically take snapshots on a schedule, or you can manually take/restore them.
A few important points
- A snapshot is not the same as a total backup - snapshots are a capture of delta data (difference between original template and a VMs current state), and should the whole VM be lost, there's no guarantee of being able to recover from a snapshot.
- Snapshots are not validated or guaranteed - the process is automatic, and with thousands taken daily it is not possible to validate them - in short, always have a backup!
- Snapshots can also be used to create your own templates to deploy from at a later date.
Snapshots are a great tool that allows a level of resiliency to data loss and an easy way to scale horizontally by deploying per-configured VMs, but are in no way a substitute for an actual backup plan.
We recommend a 3-step plan for backups
- Make use of OnApp's automated snapshots
- Make use of Continual Data Protection (CDP) solutions like R1Soft or Open-source alternatives like Bacula
- Have a local backup, even if taken less frequently
Note: The backups are stored in the same Data Centre as the Hosts and don't offer Geographical Redundancy.
If you'd like to discuss a backup solution, we're always happy to help, just get in touch