A Fail-Proof Website Backup Plan
The Importance of Website Backups
Backups are often overlooked by website owners, even though they should be made a priority. It can be something we only think about after something has gone wrong and by then it is too late, backups are all about insurance.
Bad Things Can and Do Happen
You never know when a hard drive could fail, files become corrupt, or your site becomes a victim of a security breach. If you don’t have a reliable backup ready, the damage could be huge in terms of time and money, the loss could be detrimental to your business.
You Need Onsite and Offsite Backups
Many web hosting plans include at least onsite backups. This is a good first step, but you need two types of backups before you’re safe.
How/Where to Backup a Website (Properly)
Onsite Website Backups
Onsite backups are stored in the same location as your website and are often administered by your web hosting company. These are ideal to restore your site quickly, especially if you’ve accidentally deleted a file, page, or post.
Human Error
We often use these when human error is involved. A quick restore after accidental deletion or something like that.
What About Technical Failure
But what happens if this location itself is compromised? For example, what if the server your website is on experiences catastrophic failure and the data is not easily or quickly recoverable?
Even worse there could be physical damage to the facility your web server is housed in such as fire or water damage. In this scenario, any onsite backups would also be damaged and unrecoverable.
We have also seen situations where local backups have stopped working and by the time anyone notices a lot of time has gone by.
This is where offsite backups come in.
Offsite Website Backups
Offsite backups work in the same way, but they’re stored at a different physical location than your primary or onsite backups.
This creates a fairly obvious scenario whereby if the primary location or server is damaged beyond quick repair you can reinstate your website and web applications from the offsite backups.
Offsite backups are typically not as quick to restore but in the event of a major fault, they can be a lifesaver!
How to Backup a Website Offsite
There are many backup services out there that allow you to create regular and automated backups. You can have them emailed to you or stored on a third-party service such as Dropbox or Amazon S3. These solutions can be automated and only cost a few pennies a month.
WordPress, for example, has available many easy-to-use plugins. Many other CMSs also have out-of-box solutions and/or a custom solution is most likely not a huge challenge.
For WordPress in particular, I recommend any of the following plugins that allow you to automate backups and store copies on third-party services:
Backup Best Practices
Keep a minimum of 3 backups in 3 different locations (computers, clouds, networks, geographic locations, etc.).
What to Backup
Backup Website Files and Database
Most modern websites include both files and databases. For example, a WordPress site’s files include your images, themes, and plugins, while the MySQL database contains every post, comment, and link on your blog as well as a reference to every image and where it belongs.
Website Backups are Not Always Automatic
Over the years we have worked with an uncountable number of hosting companies on behalf of our clients and for one reason or another have requested either file or database backups.
On more than a few occasions the backups have been a struggle to get for one of the following reasons:
- It is not the policy of the host to provide backups to their customers
This is probably the most frustrating reason of all! Web hosts typically include a bullet point about regular backups in their service description, so why on earth would they refuse to give them to their customers? The explanation we have gotten is that the backups are to protect them from catastrophic technical failure and are to be only pulled in the event something fails on their side (not the customers). - Regular backups are not taken
On a few occasions, we have been provided a backup by a hosting company only to find it is months or weeks old. There are times when this will do the trick but if your site is active and/or holds critical information such as e-commerce orders, even losing a day’s worth of data can be damaging to your business. Weekly or monthly backups are better than nothing, they may not cover your needs should you need to reinstate one of these dated backups. - No backups are taken
The full responsibility of the account holder is to provide their own solution. This is the scariest reason of all. Typically, on a super budget hosting plan, not having any kind of backup plan is simply crazy. These plans rely on their customers to come up with their own solution which may be a plugin or third-party service. The caveat here is that these kinds of hosts typically don’t make it a point to let the customer know that this is among their responsibilities.
What to Ask Your Host About Website Backups
Make sure to read your hosts policy on backups and get the following questions answered:
- How often are backups taken of both the web files and database?
- Where are those backups stored?
- Do I have access to those backups at any time?
- How long does reinstatement take if I need to roll back and or want to download a copy?
- If you do not provide backup and/or access to those backups, do you have tools that allow me to set up my own backup routine?
How We Do Website Backups at FatLab
At FatLab we take daily backups incredibly seriously. We figure no matter what happens we want to ensure our clients always have a way to reinstate their business after human error, catastrophic disaster, security breaches… whatever! For the sites we host, automatic backups happen daily at several levels.
Server Level Backups
For the sites we host, we automatically back up all sites (files and database) at the server level. The latest version is stored locally where either we or the client has access to it via SFTP. Anything beyond a day old is removed from the primary server and held on a different server for up to two weeks and can be retrieved by our team if needed.
Offsite/Third-Party Backups
We utilize ManageWP to monitor and manage all our WordPress client websites and they make creating a backup plan super easy.
Through this service, we take daily incremental backups (file and database) which are stored on third-party servers for 90 days. We can download or restore to any day’s backup in less than an hour.
Backups of Backups
Both the server level and offsite backups are held in replication through their various providers in different geographically diverse locations. We should never be without a backup when needed and neither should you. This is not only peace of mind for our clients but also for us, as we probably think about this more than our clients do.
