Most website owners have a backup plan. And it’s usually: my host does that.
They probably do. Nearly every host backs up something, and they state it right on the sales page. But the details vary more than you think. GoDaddy’s basic hosting keeps just one day of backups; thirty days is a paid add-on, unless you’re on their managed WordPress plans,where it’s included. Some budget hosts charge $49 to restore one, if a backup is available. And plenty of good hosts include a month of backups and a restore button. “We do backups” describes all of them.
Here are four things a website backup should do before you can truly count on it.
It runs every day
Daily backups should be the base minimum. It means in the worse case you lose only a day of changes, which for most sites it might not even be an issue. For an e-commerce store, it could mean a day of orders. That’s why some of our customers get real-time backups instead: changes saved as they happen, so almost nothing is lost.
Ask your host: How often do backups run, and when?
It lives somewhere else
A backup stored on the same server is a copy, not a backup. If the server dies, so does the backup. If the site is hacked, the backup is sitting right there too.
Our backups are kept off the server entirely, in the cloud. The right way to do it.
Ask your host: Where are the backups kept?
It goes back far enough
A single backup from yesterday is just that. But the problems a backup solve aren’t limited to the ones you just noticed today… A plugin update breaks your contact form, and you find out three weeks later, when a customer mentions they wrote twice and never heard back. Someone overwrites or deletes a page. A site gets hacked, and the malware sits quietly for a month before Google puts a red warning screen in front of your visitors.
If your backups go back seven days, it won’t help on a three week old issue. Invariably you need a backup from before the issue happened.
We keep 30, 60, or 90 days, depending on the plan. Three months sounds like a lot until you need day 65.
Ask your host: How far back do the backups go?
It can be easily restored
When something goes wrong, you almost never want the whole site put back. Roll a store back three weeks to fix a single page and you’ve lost three weeks of orders.
So we don’t start a restore by simply hitting the restore button. We take the backup and spin it into a staging site – a private, working copy of the site exactly as it was on that day. Then we’ll look for for the specific thing that needs to be restored. Sometimes the problem is older than we though, so we go back further. It’s the beauty of having 90 days of backups.
And by “we”, we mean WE – me Bryan, and my team of real people who know your site, what you need fixed and how best to get it done. With a lot of hosts, you get a restore button, or a support ticket, but the deciding what to bring back is up to you.
Ask your host: If I need a restore, who does it, and how long does it take?
Send them the email
If you don’t know the answers to the four questions above, do reach out to your hosts. Hopefully they get back to you quickly and with clear answers. If the answers are vague, you’ve at least found out now, before the fit hits the shan.
When a new site comes to us, the very first thing we do is take a backup. Before any fixes, or updates. It’s what allows us to run updates every day without crossing our fingers. And if you want to read more about what our daily support actually covers, I wrote a post about it on Spigot: What Our Daily Support Actually Means.
Want a good backup strategy handled for you?
Daily backups, 30 to 90 days of history, and restores done by us come with every Cinch plan, fully managed or support-only.