User:Tmtoulouse/backup

Prevention

The first step to ensuring data safety is the use of hardware the help prevent the most common disasters. Our website is hosted on a server that uses aRAID 10 system for data storage which provides significant fault protection.

Firewall

A full sql dump of the database is created every night and stored on the server. This is a good basic protection for database corruption caused by crashes or OS issues that doesn't require a full file system restore.

First line of defense

A daily and weekly snapshot of our server is taken that contains the complete OS, filesystem and database. This is stored on-site with the server but on a separate machine and allows easy recovery from most types of potential disaster.

Oh shit protection

Every three days the current filesystem and database dump are copied to off-site to Amazon S3 high-redundancy storage. This allows recovery from a complete disaster that wipes out our server provider or their data center site.

The final line

Every night the content of RationalWiki is dumped into an xml file that can be imported into any wiki. This is made available to everyone (see: content dumps). This contains only the text content of the site, with no user information, history, or image data. But its small size (around 55 MB) means that it is easy to download and store by any user that wants to make sure that they always have the core of the website.