R1Soft Continuous Data Protection

NextGen uses R1Soft’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology to backup your entire website securely and offsite every eight hours. This feature is included at no extra cost on every NextGen account.

However, not only is your data backed up more frequently, it is also stored in a secure off-site location away from the server which hosts your site. Our private network transports the backups to a separate location, providing ultimate peace of mind even during worst case scenario situations where data recovery is required. If an incident occurs, an entire server can be recovered from an extremely recent backup in a matter of minutes.

What does this mean for our clients?

• Complete backups every eight hours, meaning three backups per day, per server.
• All backups are stored for two weeks, providing 42 backup archives or restore points for your site’s data.
• Direct cPanel backup restore functionality (see demo) allows you to restore your own files quickly and easily without contacting NextGen Support. This features is extremely useful for web developers and designers who might make a mistake editing their site and then need to restore their site to a recent backup.
• Near-Continuous Data Protection minimizes data lose in case of disaster or accidental deletion.
• Data is stored in NextGen’s offsite DataVaults, which are fully secured against attacks and unauthorized access.

How Does CDP Work?

The CDP Server works by reading your hard disk volumes at the sector level, bypassing the file system for the ultimate in performance and recovery. This disk sector synchronization is performed while the server is online and provides no interruption to other I/O requests even on a busy server. By reading the disk at the lowest possible level point-in-time recovery images contain your files and all the formatting, partition tables, and volume configuration needed for complete and instant disaster recovery.

Scheduled point-in-time volume snapshots are also scheduled on the CDP Server. The CDP server then periodically connects to the CDP Agent program and synchronizes changed disk sectors to the CDP Server. The CDP Server creates a new point-in-time image of the disk volume every time it connects to the agent for synchronization. The point-in-time images are called recovery points and are stored in what’s known as a Disk Safe.

Recovery points only consist of a copy of changed disk sectors. This means it usually only take seconds or minutes to complete disk synchronization even on very large volumes. The more frequently recovery points are schedule the quicker they complete. When compression is enabled hundreds of recovery points can be stored in less space than it takes to store one disk image. In between synchronization requests from the CDP Server, the CDP Agent passively tracks changes to the hard disks as they are happening. This process introduces NO overhead and requires a relatively small amount of memory (as seen in the graph above). This is typically about 6MB of memory per 100GB of disk storage being synchronized.

Want to know more about how CDP works to backup and protect NextGen Servers? Click here to view a video on it or contact NextGen Sales.