Backup Policy

Please see our legacy backup policy for all solutions deployed prior to 2024.

Scope

This policy defines the standards applied to Pipe Ten backup in relation to services on which customer data resides or passes. Unless explicitly defined in this policy, product definition or a contract, it is to be assumed backups are not maintained.

Every possible care is taken to ensure the availability and validity of Pipe Te’s backup service, but it is not guaranteed.

Pipe Ten strongly recommends customers maintain their own backups irrespective of service level.

Definitions

Backup

The action of duplicating data for the purposes of later recovery.

Restore

The action of recovering data from a backup.

Frequency

How often the action is performed.

Retention

How long the backup copy is stored.

Local

Different physical hardware to the original, within the same physical geography.

Remote

Different physical hardware to the original, within a different physical geography.

Physical Geography

A physical location with diverse utilities, not within 2 miles of any other defined geography (often much further / regional).

Immutability

Protection against tampering and deletion.

DR and BCP

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning will almost certainly involve the use of backup and restore but are distinctly different plans and processes for the recovery of supporting infrastructure and business processes.

Storage

The volume of data used from the storage of backups.

Compression

Reduction in data size to save storage space and speed up transfers.

Encryption

Conversion of data (backups at rest and backups/restores in transit) into a format that cannot be easily read without authorisation.

Bandwidth

The volume of data transferred over the network during the action of backup or restore.

On-Net

The transfer of data over/on networks where capacity and costs are tightly managed and often inclusive.

Off-Net

The transfer of data over/on networks where capacity and costs cannot be managed and not inclusive.

Backup Profiles

For simplicity and efficiency, we define the following backup profiles:

Higher frequency backups, while available, are often better addressed through other means (replication/mirroring/AAG/RAID).

Restore Testing

Pipe Ten does not generally test the ability to restore from backup for any particular customer or service except where forming part of our own DR/BCP or explicitly requested by a customer.

We frequently perform backup restores for customers as part of our day-to-day business which helps to verify the methods, we otherwise perform specific restore testing where:

• Software/method in use differs from the norm.
• Major change of operating system version.
• Major change of backup software version.
• Significant change to network infrastructure.
• Significant change to associated software (eg. firewalling or anti-virus methods).
• During our own DR/BCP testing.
• Scheduled or ad-hoc testing as agreed with specific customers.

Software & Licensing

Backups may be manual, scripted and/or making use of third-party licensable software such as VEEAM.

Billable licensing costs, where applicable, are defined within the service contract and may be subject to change based on the cost defined by the provider.

Storage Calculations

In addition to any licensing costs, the amount of storage used by backups on the backup service is typically billable.

All of our backup services utilise both compression (reduces the storage requirements) and encryption (increases the storage requirements).

Storage costs are rounded up to the next largest GB unless otherwise defined in the service.

The amount of billable storage required can be difficult to define and is dependent on the rate of change, how compressible the data is, the frequency and retention of backup and any remote duplication.

For purposes of estimation, we assume a compression ratio of 2:1 (subject to encryption, change and duplication).

For example, based on a 1TB HDD with 100GB of storage used with consistent changes of +/- 1GB occurring with each backup (resulting in 100GB required storage each day) may be calculated on the following profiles as:

• Minimum = (100GB+7*1GB)/2 = 54GB
• Standard = ((100GB+180*1GB) local + (100GB) remote)/2 = 190GB

Bandwidth

The bandwidth incurred for the transfer of data between on-net locations is typically included in the backup service storage costs.

The bandwidth incurred for the transfer of data to/from off-net backups is frequently at an additional cost from Pipe Ten and/or the off-net provider.

Backup and restore network speeds may vary, and expedited network bandwidth not agreed in advance may be billable additionally.

Databases

Depending on the database technology in use, special consideration may need to be made in respect to non-disk transaction-safe backups and result in additional backup storage use. Please consult with support for clarification on specific database technology backup and restore capability.

Infrastructure Backups

The following table outlines the backups Pipe Ten undertakes by default on its own infrastructure which holds or passes customer data or configuration.

Customer Backups

Backup profiles for customers are defined within the customers solution contract.

Last changed: 2024/05/23 by Carl Heaton

Classification: Public
Last saved: 2024/05/23 at 11:44 by Carl