Backups, Redundancy and Archiving
Backups, Redundancy and Archiving are strategies that may be employed to ensure data integrity and preserve the viability of a company's operations. For some companies, Backups will be sufficient. For others, all three may be needed.
BillMax offers a backup and three month archival service for BillMax related databases and files. If interested please contact sales@billmax.com. Whether or not BillMax services are utilized, having good backups cannot be emphasized enough.
Backups
- On the BillMax Server:
- The /opt/billmax directory.
- The /usr/local/billmax directory.
- The billmax database.
- The billmax_reports database.
- Any system files used for emailing, printing, networking, etc.
- On the BillMax Customer Portal Server, the files used for the customer portal. The location of these files differs depending on the setup of the web server hosting the Customer Portal.
A program such as tar may be used to create a backup of the directories. There are many utilities such as mysqldump and mysqlhotcopy to create database backups. Some customers prefer commercial solutions. Other customers prefer to shutdown the database completely and use tar to backup the database files.
It is strongly recommended that recovering from a backup be tested periodically to make sure backups are being done correctly.
Redundancy
Archiving
Archiving backups is useful if there is a need to revisit database status and activity from the past. True story: A company had a disgruntled ex-employee that managed to still have access to BillMax. Rather than cause a catastrophic failure this employee would periodically delete accounts from BillMax. When discovered, the company was able to analyze 6 months of data and logs to rebuild the deleted accounts and collect evidence of the malfeasance. In this case Backups and Redundancy were insufficient.