Frequently Asked Questions

The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET FAQ (*)

Our Service (*)

Q. What is NearlyFreeSpeech's backup strategy for user content?

For site content, we use 3-way mirroring to protect live data, and we take snapshots twice per day. For member MySQL processes, we have less flexibility, but we still take daily full backups of data from each process.

We maintain both local and offsite copies of those backups and age them out on a space-available basis so that, at any given time, we have many viable restore-points available.

We also maintain both live and offsite replicas of the core databases containing member and account data.

Our goal is that in the event of a serious catastrophe that destroyed our primary datacenter, data loss would be limited to everything since the most recent backup, which averages 6 hours for sites and 12 hours for MySQL processes.

However, if we actually had to restore everyone's backups, the amount of data involved is substantial. It would take a really long time, especially if we had to rebuild our infrastructure from scratch first. You might reasonably want access to a copy of your data sooner than we could provide it. We therefore strongly encourage every member to make their own backups.