Little do people know, but R1Soft restore software, courtesy of our web hosting provider (www.handsonwebhosting.com) has already saved HostingDiscussion.com a few times during the past short 2 months.

While I will hold off from revealing the details of the events until I gather more information (I probably should write up a story about what took place for our blog), I wanted to inquire how many web hosting operators actually have the software employed on their servers, and what have your experience been like? What do you think of this application from an investment point of view? Useless? Priceless?

R1Soft (www.r1soft.com) offers continuous data protection for both Linux and Windows based servers.

I tried to deploy it on a server. I ended up very frusterated trying to deploy it and ended up canceling the service. Conor, has been very willing to show me how to fix it and setup a demo account. When I get back to that point, I look forward to trying it and seeing its true value.

I use it every single day on so many machines. Our users are also avid users on a regular basis of the software. It's not just useful for recovering from server failure or modified files, but if a user deletes a file (which is often the case for restores) you have a backup that you can go back HOURS or WEEKS if needed.

As a web host, if you don't use it, you should! If you need the software and/or server for backup, we have machines preconfigured for it. I've also written a few easy scripts to deploy the software quickly to servers, so if you have a bunch of machines, you can easily get them online within a few minutes.

I remember talking to Zachary on this before, and the setup can be a bear in the beginning, but just like Nagios or a server monitoring program, once it's configured, it's something that just sits in the background and saves your butt when needed.

We've used r1soft's solution for at least 2 or 3 years now, and I honestly don't know where we'd be without it!

I personally do not have this on our servers, however just like Nagios it seems very attractive and I may just have to see what this is all about for myself. Who knows, I may end up loving it so much that I have to keep a poster of it on the wall. jk

Worth the investment - no more late nights restoring servers. And if a server DID fail, you can do a full restore to an alternate server (with databases etc too). Who here HASN'T spent hours awake restoring hundreds of accounts on machines due to a crash!!

How do you have it setup for the backup, do you use another box on the same network or do you do it off-network?

For our ones, we have a number of backup boxes, they're in the same network (The Planet) however if the production server is located in the H1 Building (Houston 1) then the backup machine is located in the Dx Building (Dallas). There's 9 separate data center buildings for The Planet, I think 2 or 3 in Houston and 6 in Dallas, so we just make sure our data is not in the same building. Even the servers in Germany and Australia are with different buildings. Costs more to do it in those two countries, but it's worth the investment when the crap hits the fan!

Can’t say that that I’ve been an exception to that rule, however since setting up R1 I haven’t yet had a need to use it so I’m currently debating its worth personally, that is thus far my clients are yet to request backups or restores on the serves that utilise the service (touch wood).

Granted it’s an advantage when such an occurrence happens, but that said most seem to be of the understanding that they should also run backups themselves, as well as ourselves backing up each servers hard drives daily and utilizing R1, but its better safe than sorry on that front.

Just seems unused currently, however Id expect that to change at some point.

Do you have yours integrated with the control panel? If so, maybe you're not seeing the request coming to the admins to restore files, as the user can do it directly from their control panel without issue.

We see a lot of database restores or specific table requests (since mysql can't automatically restore from the users control panel). Most of these requests come from people who are upgrading software, or making modifications to stores and realiing that something didn't go right.

We still encourage users to make their own backups, and we still have in our TOS that we are not responsible for lost data etc, however for what we pay to backup our servers, it's pennies compared to the angry customer who loses their site and then jumps ship to a new host since they lost their site. This was a trend we saw on the web as a whole.

Currently Not however i may consider doing so, i wasent entirely aware of that option although reasearched it a little after reading so thanks for that one.

I couldn’t agree more, it seems that people despite all the advice in the word and assistance still will jump ship only to experience the same difficulties, I for one have seen the loss of a large number of files of a "bricks" business that refused to take advice with the attitude of "it will never happen to us" thus losing a large amount of important data and then the cash spent to resolve the issue little more than a number of months after.

All of which could have been resolved at a minimal expense compared to the hard drive recovery costs, that said they still came back for advice and as a result also decided to move their website to us subsequently after based on the advice we provided for an offline backup info structure.

That said it always seems to be the last minute thought for most.

Some people will never understand the essence of regular backups until they experience bad results for themselves. Indeed, it can be the last thing on one's mind at times, but in the end it's all worth it.

I deploy it on my servers, and love it, even mentioning it on my site as a feature. Easy backup functionality is essential for any web hosting plan, IMHO.

We use r1soft for all of our shared servers and have it as an option for our dedicated servers. The software is great. We have never had to use the baremetal restore, however have tested it and it seems to work as it should. R1soft support is also great. They call us every couple weeks and ask what we think of new releases, what could be changed, etc.

Yah two weeks ago I could have cared less at the time until our shared server crashed....o boy was that fun. We had backups, some were new some were old which caused a lot of issues. Bought r1 last week after that mess and even though it was a pain to setup it was far far worth it after that craziness

We are running R1Soft now and have been very happy with it. Great product to offer to VPS / Dedicated clients as it allows them to control their back / restores.