We work hard to keep our sites on-line! Sometimes the systems don't cooperate, as in the case a few days ago. For some reason the system halted, when it came back up after a reboot the web server and mail server refused to start. A quick recompile of apache (the web server) and a upgrade of the server maintenance software bought everything back on-line. We were only down for about 45 minutes.
As for backups/data loss, we are protected... Each night the working directories and databases for all sites are copied off of the main hard drive and backed up to a separate hard drive. This prevents loss from hardware failure, so we have complete backups on a separate hard drive.
After the main backup is complete all the files from the backup hard drive a synced with another server in a different data center (physically different buildings and about 1000 miles apart). This gives us 100% backup every day, backups at 2 locations. And from time to time we download those backups to our hard drives and store them on DVD ROMS (YES the sites are that big).
If a major outage should arise, the maximum data loss would be about 1 day.
-FD
__________________
|