When we review backup setups for websites, e‑commerce stores and SaaS apps, we see the same pattern again and again: everything is dumped onto a single disk, often on the production server, and called a “backup strategy”. It works until the first real incident or ransomware attempt. A more resilient and cost‑efficient approach is to design a hot, cold and archive storage strategy and map it carefully to the right technologies: NVMe, SATA SSD/HDD and object storage. In this article, we will walk through how we design these tiered backup setups on dchost.com infrastructure for real projects, what each layer is responsible for, how frequently you should back up to it, and how to keep the overall cost under control without sacrificing restore speed or safety.
We will explain concepts like RPO/RTO in simple language, show example architectures for a single VPS, multi‑server stacks and colocated dedicated servers, and link everything back to the 3‑2‑1 rule and ransomware‑resistant design. By the end, you will have a clear blueprint to combine NVMe, SATA and object storage into a calm, predictable backup system you can actually trust.
İçindekiler
- 1 What Do Hot, Cold and Archive Storage Really Mean for Backups?
- 2 Mapping Hot, Cold and Archive to NVMe, SATA and Object Storage
- 3 Start with Objectives: RPO, RTO and the 3‑2‑1 Rule
- 4 Real‑World Architectures: How the Three Tiers Work Together
- 5 Sizing NVMe, SATA and Object Storage for Backups
- 6 Automation, Tools and Backup Flow Between Tiers
- 7 Testing Restores: The Most Important Part You’re Probably Skipping
- 8 How dchost.com Infrastructure Fits This Strategy
- 9 Bringing It All Together: A Calm Backup Strategy You Can Trust
What Do Hot, Cold and Archive Storage Really Mean for Backups?
Before talking about hardware (NVMe, SATA, object storage), it is crucial to agree on terminology. “Hot”, “cold” and “archive” are not marketing terms; they describe how quickly you need access to a given backup and how often it changes.
- Hot backup storage: Very fast, very close to production, used for frequent backups and quick restores. Think “I broke the site with a bad deploy, roll back now”.
- Cold backup storage: Slower and cheaper, used for daily or weekly backups, disaster scenarios and older restore points within, say, 30–90 days.
- Archive storage: Very cheap per GB, optimized for long retention (months or years). Access is infrequent and often for compliance, audits or rare incident investigations.
These three layers map nicely to different technologies:
- Hot → NVMe on or very close to the production server
- Cold → SATA SSD or HDD on a separate backup server or NAS
- Archive → S3‑compatible object storage in another environment or region
If you want a deeper comparison of disk technologies, it is worth reading our detailed guide on NVMe SSD vs SATA SSD vs HDD for hosting, backups and archives. Here, we will focus on how to combine them in one coherent strategy.
Mapping Hot, Cold and Archive to NVMe, SATA and Object Storage
Hot Storage: NVMe for Fast Backups and Instant Restores
Hot backups live on very fast storage, typically the same NVMe pool that powers your production database and application, or an NVMe‑backed volume in the same data center. The goal is simple: you want to be able to create and restore backups without I/O bottlenecks and within minutes.
Common hot backup patterns we deploy on NVMe:
- Database snapshots or dumps every 5–15 minutes for critical MySQL/PostgreSQL workloads.
- Filesystem snapshots (LVM/ZFS/Btrfs) for application code and configuration before each deployment.
- Short‑retention rolling backups, for example the last 12–24 hours.
Because NVMe has very high IOPS and low latency, these backups can be taken with minimal impact on production workloads. For detailed techniques on taking consistent hot backups using snapshots, we explained LVM snapshot workflows in our article about application‑consistent backups with LVM and fsfreeze.
Typical use cases for NVMe hot backups:
- Rolling back a bad deployment of your Laravel or WooCommerce site within minutes.
- Recovering just a few hours of lost orders or user data after a bug.
- Fast cloning of production to a staging environment for debugging.
Because NVMe is more expensive per GB, we keep retention short at this layer and push older backups to cheaper cold and archive tiers.
Cold Storage: SATA SSD/HDD for Daily and Weekly Backups
Cold storage is where most of your operational restore points will live. This is usually a separate VPS, dedicated backup server or NAS using SATA SSDs or large HDDs. Latency is less critical here; what matters is capacity, sequential throughput and isolation from production.
In a typical dchost.com setup, we might configure:
- Incremental filesystem backups from production servers every night.
- Daily database dumps or streaming backups (binlog/WAL) copied to the backup server.
- 30–90 days of retention, depending on your business and legal needs.
Because this cold tier is physically or logically separate from your production NVMe, it already provides a layer of protection against disk failure and certain ransomware scenarios. However, we still treat it as “near‑online”: fast enough to restore an entire VPS or database in a reasonable time if your primary server fails.
Hardware characteristics we care about here:
- Disk size: Enough capacity to hold full + incremental backups for your chosen retention.
- Sequential throughput: Affects how fast you can restore several hundred GB.
- Redundancy: RAID‑1/5/6/10 or ZFS mirrors/parity to survive a disk failure.
Archive Storage: Object Storage for Long‑Term Retention
Archive storage is where we push backups that you rarely need, but cannot delete yet: monthly full backups, quarterly snapshots, legal email archives, logs for forensic analysis, etc. The perfect tool for this is object storage — S3‑compatible buckets hosted in another environment or region.
Why object storage works so well as an archive tier:
- Designed for huge capacity at low cost per GB.
- Durability through replication or erasure coding across multiple disks and nodes.
- Fine‑grained lifecycle policies to move old objects to colder classes or delete them automatically.
- Support for versioning and immutability / Object Lock, which is critical for ransomware‑resistant design.
We covered cost aspects in detail in our guide on object storage cost optimization with lifecycle policies, cold storage and bandwidth control. In this article, we will focus on how it complements NVMe and SATA in a layered backup design.
Start with Objectives: RPO, RTO and the 3‑2‑1 Rule
Before you decide “how much NVMe vs SATA vs object storage” you need, you should define two key numbers:
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data can you afford to lose? 5 minutes of orders? 1 hour of email? 24 hours of blog comments?
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How long can you afford to be down while restoring? 5 minutes? 1 hour? Half a day?
We explained these concepts step by step in our article on how to design a backup strategy with clear RPO/RTO. Your hot, cold and archive layers exist to meet those numbers at the lowest possible cost.
Alongside RPO/RTO, we also rely heavily on the classic 3‑2‑1 backup rule:
- Keep 3 copies of your data
- On 2 different media types
- With at least 1 copy off‑site
NVMe + SATA + object storage are a natural match for 3‑2‑1:
- Copy 1: Production data + hot backups on NVMe
- Copy 2: Cold backups on a separate SATA‑based backup server
- Copy 3: Archive backups in off‑site object storage
If you want a more operationally focused walk‑through, we recommend our hands‑on guide to the 3‑2‑1 backup strategy and how to automate it on cPanel, Plesk and VPS.
Real‑World Architectures: How the Three Tiers Work Together
Scenario 1: Single NVMe VPS Hosting WordPress and WooCommerce
Imagine a WooCommerce store running on a single NVMe‑backed VPS at dchost.com. You have peaks of order activity during campaigns, and a broken update is not acceptable. Here is a simple, robust three‑tier layout:
- Hot (NVMe on the VPS)
- LVM snapshots of the entire VPS volume every 30–60 minutes, kept for 24 hours.
- MySQL logical dumps (or Percona XtraBackup) every 15–30 minutes into a local NVMe backup directory.
- Cold (separate SATA backup VPS)
- Nightly rsync/rsnapshot/restic pulls of web root, uploads and database dumps.
- 30–60 days of retention with incremental backups.
- Archive (object storage)
- Weekly full backups and monthly full images pushed from the backup VPS to object storage.
- 12–24 months of retention, with lifecycle policies to move older objects to colder classes or delete them.
With this structure, recovering from a failed plugin update is as simple as rolling back to last hour’s snapshot on NVMe. If the entire VPS is lost, you restore quickly from the SATA‑based backup VPS. If something catastrophic or long undetected happens (e.g. compromise 3 months ago), you still have archive copies in object storage.
Scenario 2: Small SaaS with Separate App and Database Servers
For a SaaS application with an app server and a separate database server, we often design hot storage directly on the database server’s NVMe, cold storage on a dedicated backup box, and archive on object storage:
- Database NVMe (hot): Continuous binlog/WAL archiving, plus frequent physical or logical backups. RPO can be under 5–10 minutes.
- Backup server with SATA (cold): Receives streaming backups and file snapshots from all SaaS nodes (app, DB, queue, cache, etc.), with 60–90 days retention.
- Object storage (archive): Monthly full backups, configuration exports and anonymized datasets for long‑term retention or analytics.
With proper automation and documentation, you can spin up new VPS instances at dchost.com, restore from object storage and get the service running again even if an entire data center goes offline.
Scenario 3: Colocation or Dedicated Server with Local RAID
If you use a dedicated server or colocation with dchost.com and manage your own RAID array, the pattern is similar but with more local capacity:
- Hot: NVMe cache or NVMe OS/DB disks in RAID‑1, with frequent snapshots and local backup directories.
- Cold: Large SATA HDD array in RAID‑Z/RAID‑6 used exclusively for backups and logs from the same server and from other servers in your rack.
- Archive: Encrypted replica of cold backups to remote S3‑compatible object storage.
The advantage of colocation/dedicated in this context is full control over RAID level, ZFS or other advanced filesystems, and very high local restore throughput. The trade‑off is that you must be disciplined about pushing archive copies to object storage so that a single rack‑level incident cannot wipe everything.
Sizing NVMe, SATA and Object Storage for Backups
Once you know your RPO/RTO and have a rough architecture, the next question is: how much of each storage type do you actually need?
How Much NVMe for Hot Backups?
We usually plan NVMe capacity for backups in two ways:
- As a percentage of your live data: For example, 20–30% extra space on your NVMe volume dedicated to short‑term backups and snapshots.
- From RPO and change rate: If your database grows by ~5% per day and you want 24 hours of hot backups at 15‑minute intervals, estimate how many incremental snapshots or WAL/binlog segments that will create.
For busy MySQL or PostgreSQL instances, you also need to consider I/O headroom. Hot backups should not push IOwait through the roof and slow down your site. This is where NVMe’s high IOPS pays off; we discussed these performance benefits in our dedicated NVMe VPS hosting deep dive.
How Much SATA for Cold Backups?
Cold backup sizing is more straightforward and depends heavily on retention:
- Estimate your total dataset size (databases + files + configs).
- Decide how many full backups you want to keep (for example 4 weekly fulls).
- Estimate the daily change rate (5–20% is common for active sites, much less for static content).
- Multiply by the number of days for which you want incrementals (for example 30–60 days).
Tools like restic, Borg or rsnapshot use deduplication and compression, which means your actual disk usage can be significantly lower than a naïve full‑copy calculation. Still, for safety, we usually provision at least 2–3× your dataset size on the SATA backup server for 30–90 days of retention.
How Much Object Storage for Archives?
For object storage, you have two big advantages:
- It is easy to scale up as needed.
- Lifecycle policies can gradually move or delete older data.
We typically start with a simple model:
- Monthly full backup of the entire environment.
- Retain for 12–24 months.
- Optional: keep only every second or fourth monthly backup after the first year.
If one full backup is 200 GB, 24 monthly fulls are ~4.8 TB. With deduplication (if you use tools like restic/Borg) and compression, real usage may be closer to 2–3 TB. You can tune lifecycle policies over time, as explained in our guide on optimizing object storage costs with lifecycle rules.
Automation, Tools and Backup Flow Between Tiers
A hot/cold/archive strategy only works if moving data between tiers is fully automated. Manually copying backups is how gaps and human errors appear. Here is a typical toolchain we use on NVMe VPS and dedicated servers.
From Hot to Cold: Snapshots and Incremental Sync
- LVM or filesystem snapshots on NVMe for hot backups.
- rsync/rsnapshot or restic/Borg from production to the backup server, scheduled via cron or systemd timers.
- Compression and deduplication enabled on the backup server to save SATA capacity.
For many of our users, the easiest cross‑platform option is to use restic or rclone. We documented this in detail in our article on automating off‑site backups to object storage with rclone, restic and cron. The same flow applies between your NVMe hot tier and your SATA cold tier.
From Cold to Archive: Syncing to Object Storage
From the cold tier (backup VPS or server), we push archives to S3‑compatible object storage:
- Daily or weekly jobs that upload new or changed backup files.
- Server‑side encryption at rest enabled on the object storage.
- Bucket‑level versioning and optional Object Lock for immutability.
- Lifecycle rules that gradually move objects to colder classes or delete them.
Tools like rclone integrate nicely with object storage and support encryption, bandwidth limits and retries. Combined with cron or systemd timers, you get a fully automated pipeline from NVMe → SATA → object storage with almost no manual work.
Immutable and Ransomware‑Resistant Design
One of the biggest reasons we insist on an off‑site object storage archive is ransomware. If malware encrypts your production data and also manages to infect your backup server, you still want a copy it cannot modify or delete.
That is where object storage features like versioning and Object Lock shine. You can configure certain buckets or prefixes to be write‑once‑read‑many (WORM) for a given retention period. Even if someone obtains your backup credentials, they cannot silently delete or tamper with those archive copies.
We go deeper into these patterns in our guide on ransomware‑resistant hosting backup strategies with immutable backups and air gaps. Combined with a hot/cold/archive layout, this gives you both day‑to‑day convenience and strong protection against worst‑case scenarios.
Testing Restores: The Most Important Part You’re Probably Skipping
A beautifully layered NVMe + SATA + object storage plan is meaningless if you have never verified a full restore. We strongly recommend scheduling regular disaster recovery drills to test each tier:
- Hot tier tests: Restore a database or filesystem snapshot to a temporary directory or staging database; verify data freshness and integrity.
- Cold tier tests: Provision a test VPS, restore a full backup from the SATA backup server and confirm the application boots correctly.
- Archive tier tests: Simulate a “region down” scenario by recovering the environment from object storage into a different VPS or data center.
We described a practical process for this in our article about running safe disaster recovery drills for hosting backups. Even a simple quarterly restore test dramatically increases confidence in your design and exposes small issues (permissions, missing configs, secrets) before a real incident.
How dchost.com Infrastructure Fits This Strategy
Because we run NVMe‑backed VPS, dedicated servers and colocation in multiple data centers, we see the same patterns scale from tiny blogs to large SaaS workloads. A typical layout using dchost.com services might look like this:
- NVMe VPS for production: Your main web/app + database servers using high‑performance NVMe disks for hot data and snapshots.
- Secondary VPS or dedicated backup server with SATA disks: Aggregates cold backups from all your production instances.
- S3‑compatible object storage in another data center or region: Stores encrypted, versioned archive backups with lifecycle policies.
If you already host with us, we can help you map your current environment to this three‑tier backup model: deciding how often to snapshot on NVMe, how big your backup VPS should be, how to structure object storage buckets, and how to tie it all together with cron jobs and backup tools.
If you are planning a new project, we suggest defining RPO/RTO and backup design at the same time as you choose your hosting architecture. For example, when you evaluate whether you need one VPS or multiple VPS for dev/staging/production, our guide on hosting architecture for development, staging and production pairs nicely with the NVMe + SATA + object storage plan described here.
Bringing It All Together: A Calm Backup Strategy You Can Trust
A good backup system is not about a single magic technology; it is about a layered strategy that balances speed, cost and safety. NVMe gives you extremely fast hot backups and instant rollbacks. SATA‑based backup servers provide generous, affordable cold storage for day‑to‑day restore needs. S3‑compatible object storage adds a durable, off‑site archive layer with versioning, lifecycle rules and ransomware‑resistant immutability.
When you align these three tiers with clear RPO/RTO targets and the 3‑2‑1 rule, you end up with a setup where common incidents (bad deploys, accidental deletions) are solved in minutes, and rare disasters (hardware failures, major compromises) are still survivable without panicked improvisation. The key is to automate the flow between NVMe, SATA and object storage, and to schedule periodic restore drills so you know everything works under pressure.
As the dchost.com team, we design and operate these patterns every day across shared hosting, NVMe VPS, dedicated servers and colocation. If you would like a reality‑checked storage and backup plan for your own sites or applications, you can reach out to us with your current disk usage, growth expectations and compliance constraints. Together we can turn “I hope our backups are OK” into a calm, verifiable hot, cold and archive strategy that you actually trust.
