Support Services

Backups Services

Real World Examples

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Hacker Incident

A client of ours runs a web site providing flash video games. The site is very popular attracting millions of gamers every month. A key feature is the site is the high scores for the games. Gamers compete and their scores are submitted to the site. The gamers are fanatic about their high scores and the system is critical to the site's success.

One day, visitors discovered their scores were missing. A hacker had discovered an SQL injection exploit in one of the games. The attackers deleted numerous high score database tables. Gamers were upset and they wanted the top scores restored.

Fortunately, we had CDP backups for the server. Within 15 minutes, the high scores were back in operation.

If we had been using the built-in Plesk backup tool, the restore process would have taken over an hour. We would have to restore the site to one of our spare systems, copy the database files, and then restore the database tables to the live server.

The CDP server backups not only saved our client's data but also paid for itself on its first use. He avoided an one hour emergency support charge, which is sufficient to cover this backup costs for nearly five months.

Human Error

About 10 AM one morning, we received a critical ticket from a client. They had just deleted their only copy of a composite image on a site. The could not reach the graphics designer to get another copy. Under normal circumstance, this would not be a problem. But the site had just launched a major online marketing campaign and this site was a critical component.

Using the CDP system, we were able to restore the file within 10 minutes. Disaster avoided. To contact all of the advertising participants and have them put the campaign on hold would have taken a couple of hours. But with a good backup system in place, the issue was resolved quickly and reliably.

Though this is a minor case of how CDP has helped our clients, the incident highlights how simple errors can have wide-ranging consequences.

Data Center Fire

A explosion and fire at a prominent data center rendered some 9000 servers inoperable. People were scrambling to get their systems restored. Fortunately, many of our clients already had off-site backups using the CDP system.

Some decided to re-deploy elsewhere using the backups. Using the bare-metal recovery feature of CDP, we restored their operations at alternate locations. Others, waited out the repairs, but knew that they had full disk images sitting on a secure system far away from the data center fire.

The explosion and fire were a rare unexpected event, but underscore how even the most unlikely scenario can happen. Having reliable, strategically located backups significantly reduces business risk.

Data Corruption

11:20 PM Client: My users.txt password file is corrupt.

11:30 PM rackAID: We have a file from 11AM today. Will that work?

11:36 PM rackAID: I have backuped the current user.txt file on your server to user.txt.corrupt and restored the backup file.

12:20 AM: Client: That worked. Thanks. You hit a home run for me the first time up!

Real-case from our help desk. Within 16 minutes after the initial issue, the password access was restored for the site. By combining our server management program with our server backup plans, you can be assured of rapid response even to data loss issue.