After leading an IT agency for over a decade, I have frequently encountered a persistent challenge that demands a solution. It's the backups. Every time I bring up the topic of backups. The clients resort to a janky solution.
Below are the top 2 solutions adopted by the companies.
Solution 1: Manual Backups by IT Administrator
Pros:
- Gets the job done
Cons:
- Opportunity Cost
- Human Errors
- Slow
Solution 2: Using cron jobs.
Pros:
- Quick
- One-time engineering cost
Cons:
- The backup script can fail in some scenarios
- No backup verification in most cases
Some script failure scenarios
- Cron jobs have been reset
- Ransomware mutating the script
- Python 3.6-based backup script fails as the admin installs Python 3.7 for another project.
In both these solutions, there exist other problems
1. Reliability
No way to ensure the backup was successful.
2. Protection
Vulnerable to ransomware, virus, hardware failure, platform suspension, and human error.
3. Security
No encryption. Susceptible to data leaks & misuses.
4. Replication
No redundancy. All data is in one local drive. Failure of the hard drive is an easy gateway to disaster. Backups errors cost a fortune and can severely damage a company's reputation. What is even worse? It is the end users. Imagine if Notion lost their weeks of backups. All their customers lose their previous weeks of work along with it.
At Petti, we address these issues by delivering a high-quality one-stop backup solution for any use case. It involves building an all-in-one dashboard that enables users to reliably manage & restore backups for any platform with just a few clicks.