A website is a digital asset – an asset that represents everything that your company stands for. For many businesses, it is also the primary revenue generator. Hence, the security of a website holds paramount importance for most site owners. Right from the choice of the hosting plan to installing the latest security tools, site owners leave no stone unturned to keep their website secure. However, despite all measures, one cannot deny the possibility of a hacker or a virus scaling the defences and damaging the site/data. This is where a backup is important. Today, our area of focus is going to be website backups. We will be talking about CodeGuard Website Backup and five things that you must know about them.
What is CodeGuard?
CodeGuard is a website backup tool that monitors your site regularly and intimates you about any changes while backing up your site. It also helps you restore the site to a previous working version.
Here are five essential aspects of CodeGuard backups:
- How CodeGuard backups work
CodeGuard retrieves all data for the first backup using the ‘GET’ command over SFTP/FTP. It uses disk I/O to retrieve the files and transfer them to its servers. In subsequent backups, all content is not transferred. Instead, CodeGuard examines the metadata of each file. If it finds any change, it transfers it to its servers. New files are also transferred. If a file has been deleted, then CodeGuard makes changes on its servers accordingly. After the first backup, subsequent backups don’t entail high CPU or memory usage.
- Reliability of CodeGuard backups
CodeGuard backups are reliable. In fact, its systems work at 99.9%. In simpler terms, if CodeGuard backs up 1000 sites in a day, then a maximum of 1 site experiences some issue. The issues faced are also usually due to changes in the FTP login credentials, server maintenance by the host, change in the IP whitelisting settings, etc. Most of these issues are simple and resolved within no time.
- Security of CodeGuard backups
CodeGuard offers highly secure backups. It follows the best practices in the industry to protect your data. Some measures taken by CodeGuard to make your backups secure are:
- 256-bit AES Encryption of all passwords and backups
- Secure connections as far as possible like SFTP/SSL/SSH
- Vulnerability testing
Suffice to say, there has been no data breach or successful hack upon CodeGuard.
- Where does CodeGuard store its backups?
CodeGuard stores its backups on S3 – Amazon Web Services Simple Storage System. S3 is known for durability levels of 99.999999999%. It achieves this by storing redundant copies of your data across different facilities and geographies.
- Access needed for CodeGuard backups
While CodeGuard can work with any platform or website, you need to meet the following criteria for it to work:
- Access to your site’s SFTP/FTP credentials
- Your website must use an MS-SQL or MySQL database
- You must have the right to whitelist CodeGuard’s IP addresses for remote connection
Summing Up
A website backup is the ultimate safety net when all security measures fail. While your web host might offer automated backups, they will be stored on the same server. It is prudent to implement manual backups as well and have a copy stored at a different location. With CodeGuard, you will never have to worry about your site’s backups again.
