Automated (scheduled) backups may be purchased on a daily, weekly, and/or monthly basis at a cost of 10c per GB of storage - e.g. a backup of a 10GB disk is $1.00 per backup per month.


The backups are stored on-site on separate, dedicated storage. Backups may optionally be sent to Amazon's S3 facility for an additional fee.


Backups are not encrypted at rest. Customers are welcome to use the BYO ISO to install their own choice of OS, managing disk encryption during installation as necessary.



How it works


Unlike some other solutions that simply provide you with a few GB of FTP space and require you to manage backups yourself, BinaryLane backups are of your entire VPS disk and happen completely automatically.


These backups are taken without impact to your VPS - your cloud server will remain online while the backup takes place and its performance is not affected.


If you accidentally delete all your data, botch an upgrade, or anything else goes wrong with your server, you can perform a disk restore from within our management panel. This will result in your hard disk being reset to the state it was in at the time the backup was created.


The day and time your backups are taken can be configured within mPanel; customers also have the option to immediately create a backup. This is a good idea before undertaking a complex change like an operating system upgrade in case you need to rollback the change.



How are backups purchased


Either during purchase or at any time via the Change Plan feature, you may change the individual retention values for your daily, weekly, and/or monthly backups. 


This selection determines the physical number of backup files we will keep for that period. For example, say you have a server with a 20GB disk and you choose to purchase:


  • Take daily backups, stored for 2 days
  • Take weekly backups, stored for 1 week
  • Do not take a monthly backup


You will have 3 backups stored in our system. Each backup will cost $2.00/month (20GB disk @ 10c per GB) giving this configuration a total cost of $6.00/month.



Where backups are stored


Your VPS backup is stored on a separate, dedicated storage device within the same data centre as your server. This protects you against accidental deletion on your own behalf, along with providing us with a means of disaster recovery in the unlikely event that we experience a RAID failure.


It does not prevent potential data loss in the unlikely event of damage to the datacentre itself such as flooding or fire.



How are backups rotated


Backups are stored individually under the three backup frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly). When a new backup is taken and you are at your purchased limit, the oldest backup of that frequency is deleted. (Example: To retain backups that are at least 1 week old, you should keep a minimum of 2 weekly backups. This way, the oldest backup will be retained from the previous week, ensuring you have a backup that is at least 1 week old at all times.)


For example, say you have purchased daily backups stored for 2 days. On day 1 of service, a daily backup is created. On day 2 of service, a second daily backup is created. On day 3 of service, a third daily backup image is created and the image from day 1 is deleted so that the total number of daily backups remains at 2 backups.


It is possible for schedules to overlap, in which case the less frequent backup takes precedence. For example, where daily and weekly are both purchased and the weekly backup is taken on Wednesdays, a daily backup is not taken on Wednesday - the weekly backup is created instead. This occurs because if a daily backup occurred on Wednesday, it would have exactly the same data as the weekly backup.


By giving precedence to less frequent backups, the system ensures that every backup stored on your account is created on a separate day.



Can I cancel an ongoing (in progress) backup?


It is important to plan your backup schedules carefully and ensure that you have the desired number of backups retained to prevent accidental overwriting. Once a backup process has started, it is not possible to stop or cancel the action. This means that if a new backup is in progress, it will complete and potentially overwrite the existing backup according to your retention settings.


For more detailed management and planning of your backups, consider the following options:

  • Increase the retention period for your backups to ensure you always have an older backup available.
  • Regularly monitor and manage your backup schedules through mPanel to avoid conflicts and ensure data integrity.


Recovering individual files


At times you may accidentally delete individual files or directories that you later find you need; or perhaps someone has overwritten a file and you want the previous version of it.


Instead of restoring the entire disk from backup, customers may instead opt to attach a backup to their server. This facility results in a second hard-disk being available within your VPS with all the files and directories in the same state as when your backup was taken.


To recover one or more files, just browse through the second hard disk's contents and copy the data you require onto your primary disk.



Cloning a VPS


When setting up a High Availability solution, it can be tedious to repeat an identical setup procedure on two VPS. In this situation, our VPS cloning solution can be utilised to copy the hard-disk contents of the VPS you have already configured, onto the second VPS.


Cloning can also be used for testing large changes without modifying your production server or for creating a separate staging environment from your existing server.