Thursday, June 23, 2011
By now you might have heard the devastating news about DistributeIT, a leading Australian domain & website host who fell victim to a malicious hacking, causing close to 5000 websites to be wiped off the Internet. My heart goes out to these businesses :(So could this happen to sites hosted by Adobe Business Catalyst? Well, you can never say never, BUT the chances are extremely miniscule. Here's some information about Adobe's website hosting infrastructure and what you can do to further safeguard your data. I'll try not to get too technical, but this is one of those times when I need to include some techo terms.
Adobe Business Catalyst's data centres have a highly fault-tolerant server configuration. Traffic to the web servers is managed by a redundant pair of hardware 'load balancers' - this means that in the event of a server failure, traffic is immediately and transparently distributed to other servers in the pool. For database servers, there is instant fail-over to a mirror server for each database. Site assets such as images, scripts, etc are stored on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device which is essentially a separate hard disk with fault-tolerant disk configuration and redundant control units.
In case of malfunction, firewalls and other network hardware are also installed in redundant pairs for immediate fail-over. The data centers are also connected to the Internet through multiple links from different Internet service providers and this provides added reliability.
Adobe Business Catalyst also perform regular full backups of the servers. However, it is important to note that data recovery cannot be initiated for individual file backups, in other words, to restore a single web page that you might have deleted accidentally. The backups are intended to perform 'full recovery' of the servers in the event of a hardware or software failure only.
What YOU can do to further safeguard your data...At an individual site level, we recommend you retain a copy of your site's files and data locally. This includes:
- Your website pages, images and templates
- Your customer records
- Your Web App records (if you are using this functionality on BC)
Unfortunately, there isn't a magic button you can click inside your BC admin area to perform a backup of your site, however, you do have the following options available:
1) You can use FTP software to copy your web pages, templates, and layouts as often as you see fit. There are plenty of free FTP tools available and many are very easy to use.
Here's a couple you can try:
- Windows: Coffee Cup http://www.coffeecup.com/free-ftp/
- Mac: Classic FTP http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/classicftpformac.html
2) You can use BC's built-in Customer Report Generator which allows you to export all customer related information at your convenience. In the admin area of the site go to ...
Reports > Create a Customer Report and follow the wizard steps.
OR
Customers > Customers and click Export at the bottom of the screen.
3) For those sites using BC's Web App functionality (for example, you have a database to handle Job postings, Property listings etc) you can also export a copy of your Web App database at any time, go to ...
Modules > Web Apps > Manage Web Apps.
Click on the Web App to open and click "Download Entire Web App Item List".
4) For those customers with very complex sites, there is another option to maintain a replica using BC's Notifications and Web Services API's. This involves additional programming to build the bridge between your site and another database, so please contact WaratahWeb to discuss.
In the pipeline ...
To further assist, a comprehensive site backup and transfer tool – where you can download the BC site into an archive and be able to upload it again as a whole complete BC site – is currently in development by Adobe BC. We haven't been given an ETA for this as yet, but we'll certainly keep you posted.
I hope the above information is helpful and if you need any assistance, be sure to contact us.
Sydney Morning Herald article: 4800 Aussie Sites Evaporate After Hack
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/4800-aussie-sites-evaporate-after-hack-20110621-1gd1h.html
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