Offsite Backup Server

An offsite backup server is a server that will be used to store backups but that isn’t in the same location as the main source of data. Having an offsite backup server can be a life saving decision when there’s a massive failure at some location. It can be a network connectivity failure or something worse, like a natural disaster affecting the surroundings.

Offsite backup servers are commonly used to backup data over the Internet and across datacenters. Let’s say that you host all your servers in datacenter A located in California, but have an offsite backup server in another datacenter located in Chicago. If something terribly wrong happened in the datacenter located in California, you can still retrieve your data from the server in Chicago. Some offsite backup servers are always online while others that hold sensitive information may only become online to update the backups and go offline when finished. This adds a new layer of security as a hacker would have just a very narrow time frame to hack into the backup server.

Some advanced datacenters and hosting companies offer offsite backup to their customers as a safehouse bet, since disasters happen and when they do, it’s always nice to know that there’s a copy of all your data somewhere else and that even though it can take longer, you’ll get it back.

Due to the large amounts of data to be backed up, most companies using offsite backup servers will try to keep their backups as small as possible, so no system or settings files are backed up. It’s also “normal” to see that offsite backups are updated once a week or twice a month, as each backup can take over 24 hours because of Internet bandwidth limits.

An offsite backup server shouldn’t be considered as a distributed content delivery solution, as most backup servers aren’t publicly accessible to minimize any risks, some of them won’t even transfer openly through the Internet but through more advanced and secure protocols like VPN over SSL.

Another not so common type of offsite backup server is when a network storage server (NAS/SAN) is used to backup an entire network and then it’s taken somewhere else to be stored securely, that way if there’s any natural disaster, like an earthquake that brings down the building where the network is located, data can still be retrieved by getting the server from it’s secure storage.