I can’t imagine it would take very long at all. First off, having a fire at ThePlanet would be extremely rare.. you’re probably more likely to get struck by lightning. Remember that they have a lot of on-duty staff 24/7 and fire extuigishers everywhere.

They have backup generators and all that jazz, so you’re more likely to lose data to hardware failure or being hacked. Which means that ThePlanet will be able to help you set up a new server, which I can’t imagine taking more than several hours, especially if it’s an emergency or when it’s their fault (hardware failure).

Anyhow, are you sure you can only restore to the ‘source’ machine in ThePlanet? If your ‘source’ ends up burnt to a crisp, how does it differ from putting on a new machine there as opposed to a server at your house? Ask their tech support.. I think you might be able to do restore at home.. you just need to resync up with The Vault I’d imagine..

I’m just speculating though…

I use RAID mirroring on the server for automatic failover in case of drive issues and purchased DiskSync in case my whole server fell off the self or was accidentally repurposed by some newbie staff member.

I decided to test my backups by recovering a few files to my home machine. Alas! After having read through the docs and attempting to get answers from support it is looking like I can only restore to the source machine. This seems to defeat my whole purpose for paying for nightly off site backups.

So if my server is lost to fire I have to wait for thePlanet to provision me a new server so I can install the DiskSync agent on it and do my restore. How long will that be?

After two days of down time my clients are going to be demanding copies of the databases and I am going to have to say “Sorry your business has to stop while we wait for my hosting company to recover from the loss of a $100 million dollar data center and gives me a new server. LOL I am sure they will be impressed and then I’ll be retraining for my new career as a carpenter.

If I could recover files to my home server things would be different. If the data center with my server burns down, I simply log into my vault from home and download my files. Perfect!

So, while I agree that DiskSync is a great little system for producing, I have some serious concerns about being able to get at my files in case of a disaster.

If you can shed any light on restores to another machine, I’d very much appreciated it.

Cheers

Hehe..

Because look how long my post was just talking about DiscSync!

As for not using RAID, I don’t know much about server administration, but I heard it is more expensive than DiscSync, so it may be a possibility in the future, but at $80 a month currently, that’s enough money for me to put into backup security at the moment.

RAID1 + cPanel (if you use linux/cpanel) FTP backup to another server (offsite/local) is a good setup.

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Jeff