Do you keep backups of my files?

We make a full backup of your files every night (around midnight Pacific time, give or take a few hours).

On this page:

Reviewing available backups

You can use your account management control panel to see the backups that have been made for your site:

  • Login to the “My Account” control panel (having trouble?)
  • Click Backups

You'll see a complete list of all backups that are currently available.

Accessing backups using FTP or the shell

You can access your backups using an FTP program or from the command-line shell.

To access them from an FTP program, set up an additional FTP account that has access to your "home directory". Then you can use a normal FTP program to browse the "backups-tigertech" directory and copy files to your own computer.

To access backups from the shell, you can just change to the "backups-tigertech" directory: 

cd ~/backups-tigertech

The name of each backup directory is the time that the backup finished. There's also a special directory named "current" that always points to the most recent backup.

Restoring files

You can usually restore files yourself. Just use an FTP program to access the files you need from an older backup, then re-publish them.

If you would like us to do it for you, please contact us. Be sure to mention:

  1. The backup time we should use (from the control panel listing).
  2. What we should restore: files? databases? e-mail?
  3. Whether you want all the files, databases and e-mail messages restored, or just specific ones.

We don't charge for the first restore, but a $25.00 service fee may apply for restoring the same data multiple times within a 12 month period. You can avoid fees by accessing the backup files yourself using FTP.

Are they daily, weekly or monthly backups? How long are they stored?

Our system attempts to keep at least the following backups:

  • The last five daily backups
  • A backup made 7-13 days ago and a backup made 14-20 days ago (two "weekly" backups)
  • A backup made during the first week of the previous month (a "monthly" backup)

Backups from other days are often also available. See your control panel for an exact list.

What gets backed up?

Backups include all of the files for your account, including:

  • Web site files
  • All files in your home directory, such as your Web site access logs.
  • E-mail mailboxes (but see below for details)
  • MySQL databases (but see below for details)

E-mail backups

Your e-mail messages are located in the "mailstore" directory of your home directory, and are therefore backed up automatically.

However, we can only back up messages that are actually on our servers. This includes all new (unread) mail and all mail you can see in Webmail. It will not include old (previously read) incoming messages if you read mail using a program like Outlook on your own computer and you've configured that e-mail program to delete messages from the server when you read them.

So if you use your own mail program instead of Webmail, and that program deletes messages from the server after they've been read, your computer will have the only copy of the old messages. You also need to back up your own computer to make a backup of your old incoming mail and your sent mail.

If you want our backup system to store copies of your old incoming messages, too, you should make sure your mail program leaves messages on our servers after you read them. With an IMAP connection, this will happen automatically; with a POP connection, you may need to change a setting. Our mail setup instructions explain how to do this for most mail programs.

Finally, keep in mind that we can only back up e-mail that's stored in a mailbox on our servers. Any messages that you simply forward to another site will never reach our backup system in the first place. (Whoever handles the final delivery should be backing them up there, of course.)

MySQL database backups

MySQL databases are also included in the daily backups. Each database is exported ("dumped") into a file that is available in the "mysql" directory of each backup.

Please read this page for information about backing up and restoring databases.

Are the backups on-site or off-site?

We make both on-site backups (for quick retrieval) and off-site backups (for disaster recovery).

The backups listed in your control panel are the on-site backups, although they are on separate physical disks (and usually separate servers) to increase redundancy. They're not just "snapshots" on the same disk, like the "backups" offered by some companies.

Our offsite backups are stored in a different data center run by a different company. The offsite backup servers use strong security practices to block malicious attacks that could damage the primary backup servers. For example, we don't allow SSH connections to the offsite backup servers, ensuring that a "zero day remote root vulnerability" can't be used by "hackers" to destroy all backup data.

Do you guarantee the availability of backups?

We make backups as part of our planning to recover from various disasters, including data erasure, hard drive or server failures, and data center destruction.

We're glad to make our backup system available to customers, too, because it can be very useful. However, we should emphasize that we cannot guarantee any backups (the "DATA BACKUP DISCLAIMER" section of our Terms of Service has a specific notice about this).

Although we use and test our backup system regularly and consider it reliable, technical problems could prevent us from being able to restore any particular backup listed in your control panel. And of course, we may not have data from the particular moment you want to restore.

A wise course of action is to not trust any Web hosting company with all your data — not even Tiger Technologies. You should make your own additional backups to meet your own requirements.