Importance of Backups For Disaster Recovery

Having daily backups is an important part of a disaster recovery plan. You should expect that any hardware can, and will, fail at some point. Having a disaster recovery plan can save time, money, and facilitate getting back to functioning more quickly.

1. Create an automatic backup:

• See the article on setting up backups here, refer to the section on Set Up Automatic Backups. Periodically verify that your backups are up-to-date.

2. Setup an FTP server to offload you backups automatically to make sure they are stored on a different hard drive in case of a drive failure on your server. Periodically, login to your FTP server to verify that it is storing the most recent backups.

• Under Server > Backups > Set Up Automatic Backups > FTP Settings: setup your FTP server login information. After setting it up be sure to test the settings to verify they work.

4. Setup Alerts: 

• Go to Tools > Alerts Manager > Create Alert Subscriptions > Enter Subscriber Name (any label), Subscriber Email: this is the email address the Alerts will be sent to.

• Alerts Level: enable Warning and Error, disable Info to avoid getting too many emails that are not critical.

• Categories: All categories are included by default. You can select a category and click on the red x to remove that selected category.

• Save Alert Subscription

5. Consider a cold spare

You can purchase another appliance as a spare to replace your primary system. Or if you have access to VMware, you can setup a virtual machine in case of a catastrophic hardware failure. This can ensure that you are back up and running with a minimum of downtime. Here is a complete guide to replacing or reinstalling a Switchvox server.