Backups - Why only one version?

[H9Dan]

I have come across many concerns from customers about how we only keep the most recent version of data on our backup servers. Perhaps this post should help explain it more in detail.

With our shared and reseller hosting plans we perform weekly backups of each server which is stored on our off-site backup servers. We strive to keep these backups as current and in-tact as possible, however as anything can happen, sometimes the data may not be of the right date you need.

To break this down please consider the following. As of this writing we mange over 200 hosting servers (the exact number won't be made public), so for this article lets use a base number of 200. Each server has between 200-300 GB of data that resides on its hard drives. Some have less, some have much more, thus lets use 250 GB as a base line.

If you assume that we have 200 servers, and each has 250 GB of data and you multiply those, you get about 50,000 Gigabytes of data, or roughly 48.8 Terabytes (the actual backup amount is much more). To house this data, it requires multiple backup servers, and many hard drives. Roughly 50, 1TB drives, 34, 1.5TB drives, or 26, 2TB drives, depending on the server configurations. As I am sure many of you know, once you start getting in this high of a disk space range for hard drives, it starts to get expensive. The other factor is the massive amount of bandwidth that is used to perform each backup each week as well.

Now, as you can see, the provided figures are only for ONE version of backups. Now what if we wanted to keep two versions? Well then simply double the figures. We would then need to house almost 100 terabytes of data, and that doesn't include room for expansion for additional servers, or data customers may upload.

At HostNine we try to keep prices as low as possible, due to the prices we sell our packages at it is simply not feasible from a financial standpoint to retain multiple backup versions for each account we host, and 90% of the time, the version we do have is sufficient enough for the restoration need. Could we retain more versions? Sure. However then we would need to raise our prices to cover the additional cost, however many would not like to see an increase, thus the prices stay the same, and we still retain only one backup version.

I hope this helped to explain the retention of only one backup version.