We occasionally get questions about how we manage our servers, do backups, and what happens if there’s a catastrophe at our data centers.
The short answer is that we spend a serious amount of time improving our infrastructure, monitoring what we have, and automating it more. So, by the time you read this blog post, there’s a good chance that some of the info is out of date.
How often are backups created?
Right now, we back up every instance of Moraware Systemize or CounterGo every 5 minutes.
Where do the backups go?
We store copies of the backup on each server, and in a local backup drive within the data center. But, we actually have a couple of data centers (one in the Midwest and on one the East Coast) and we back up everything across data centers.
The cool thing about that is that we actually have what we call a “warm backup” – if data center #1 blows up, we can immediately start running in data center #2.
But, in a catastrophe, there’s still a chance of data being lost – it takes time for the data to transfer across the internet to the other data center. Although we haven’t had to find out the hard way, we’re guessing that the maximum data loss is around 15 minutes.
We also store all of the backups in the cloud, so if both of our datacenters are destroyed simultaneously, we can spin up new servers and restore from the cloud.
What happens if the data gets corrupted?
This is part of the reason we’re constantly monitoring our servers and data. We keep track of a bunch of logs, and we’re always looking at the integrity of the underlying databases. If we do have corruption, we can restore an older copy of a database.
How do you restore from backups?
Over the years, we’ve built a set of internal tools that let us manage our servers, and all of the data on them.
When we’re testing the infrastructure, or just moving databases around to different data centers, depending on the exact situation, it can be as easy as pushing a button on our end.
Can we get a copy of our backups if requested?
It’s technically possible to get a backup of your data, but it’s probably worthless to you for two reasons.
If we sent you a backup database, you’d need to actually do something with it, which means having a Microsoft SQL expert to open it. Plus, as soon as we send you a backup, if you’re really using it, it’ll be out of date.
All of the data centers, servers, and software are great protection against disasters. But, the most important part of our infrastructure are the multiple people who’re responsible for our servers running safe and sound. When things go wrong, there are folks at Moraware (and our data-center partners) who are ready and able to fix problems.
Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. CounterGo is countertop drawing, layout, and estimating software. Systemize is a scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you. We also sponsor StoneTalk, the podcast for countertop fabricators.
