Keeping your data safe with LetsHost

Your data is an incredibly valuable commodity. Whether you’re talking about your personal e-mail, photo library and documents stored on your laptop’s hard drive, a business critical database that stores your customer information or the files and associated databases sitting on your LetsHost web server, making sure that your data is safe and secure is crucial.

Modern digital storage media are, by and large, very reliable and robust, but occasionally things can go wrong, so it pays to take regular backups of your most important files.

How do I make a backup

That depends on what you want to back up, and where you want to back up to. Here’s a brief run down of some common backup scenarios.

1. Backing up your PC

Most modern operating systems, including recent flavours of Windows, Mac OSX and popular desktop Linux distributions, come with file backup options built in. There are also plenty of free and paid third party backup solutions… take your pick.

While the interfaces for individual backup products vary, the process is broadly similar:

• Select the files you want to back up and set a backup destination
• Run a manual backup / set an automated scheduled backup
• Keep the resulting backup files in a safe place
• Repeat frequently

If something bad happens, these programs normally let you restore a complete backup set, or choose the specific files that you’d like to recover.

2. Backing up your website(s)

Backing up a web server usually involves several steps:

• Select the files you want to back up
• Package the files into a single archive file (e.g .ZIP) on the remote server
• Download the resulting file to your local machine using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or your CPanel file manager.
• If you use databases (like MySQL) on your server, you’ll need to remember to back those up separately.

That’s a fair amount of work, and requires some technical know-how, so here at LetsHost we’ve implemented a system that makes things much easier. Every LetsHost Complete Plan hosting customer has the industry leading R1Soft Continuous Data Protection enabled on their hosting account. The system automatically takes four daily snapshots of everything in your account (files and databases) and lets you selectively restore any of your data through a simple web-based interface. Just click on the “R1Soft Backup Restore” option from the “Files” menu in your control panel.

(NB. LetsHost provides the R1Soft service as a reliable and convenient backup / restore solution for its customers, but we still recommend that you keep independent local backups of your most important data)

3. Remote online backup services

Regular local backups are much better than no backups at all, but storing important data in the same physical location as the original files is fraught with risk. That’s where secure, automated online backup services like LetsHost’s brand new PC Backup service come into play.

PC Backup is a secure “set it and forget it” backup solution. For a small monthly fee (starting at just €20 for up to 50GB of storage) we’ll automatically keep your most valuable data secure by seamlessly encrypting it and copying it to your own remote storage account. You can relax, safe in the knowledge that LetsHost is looking after your critical data for you.

Make sure your vital business information is safe… examine your backup solution, and contact us for information on how PC Backup can help keep your data secure.