All dedicated servers created after January 2019 will use mirrored boot drives.
Mirrored Boot Drives
Our servers come equipped with an extra disk drive. This extra disk drive is used to “mirror” the first drive. This means that the second drive contains a copy of the data stored in the first server.
By mirroring the drives, your server has “redundancy.” Redundancy means that if the other drive fails, then this disk drive will step up and take the failing drive’s place. This fault-tolerance keeps the server functioning and all the data safe.
This secondary drive also means that the server does not need to be rebooted if a disk drive needs to physically be swapped out. Instead, the server will remain running during the disk drive’s replacement.
Mirrored boot drives can also potentially increase your read speed by up to two times.
Snapshots
Because we use mirrored boot drives, our file system backups are taken in “snapshots.” Snapshots are essentially saved copies of your data at a point in time.
Snapshots allow us to pull files from various times in the past. For example, if you realize that you need to restore your server to a past version of itself, you could call our support team and request that they use a past snapshot to restore a past version of the server. Snapshots are not available to customers at this time. However, you can contact our support team and request something be done with your snapshots. We do not keep an exhaustive timeline of snapshots of your server; old snapshots will be removed to make room for newer snapshots. This being the case, we may not have a snapshot of the server version you require.