Hi All,

We lease 4 dedicated servers from two different providers, one in the US and another in Australia.

We've gone the extra mile by organising (via the data centres) for our servers, or at least key hosting data on them, to be backed up to remote locations.

But we've just worked out (thankfully not because we had to!) that the remote data backups are only accessible via the 'source' data centre.

So I'm thinking of a scenario where the source data centre is down for a long time, and so we'd like to access the remote backups so that we can restore the hosting accounts to one of our other servers. But we can't get to the data because the source data centre is down.

Kind of defeats the object of having a remote data backup, don't you think?!?

I would suggest changing how your remote backups are running.
How is it currently configured. Perhaps change it to use Rsync ?
Might be better off not having to be dependent on the 'Source' Datacenter.

We're going to do a review of all our servers, and make adjustments wherever we're not able to access the remote backups independently of the source data centres.

It's strikes me as a bit weird that the people offering up these remote backups solutions didn't see or alert us to the potential inherent weakness in such a service.