Why your website needs off-site backups

Backups usually come up at the worst possible moment: after a bad update, a hacked plugin, or an accidental delete. That is when you find out whether yours actually work.

What backups protect you from

• Mistakes: a deleted page, a broken theme edit, an update that went wrong.
• Attacks: a hacked site you need to roll back to a clean copy.
• Losing the server: hardware failure, a cancelled account, or a billing problem at the host.

Backups on the same server handle the first two. Only a copy stored somewhere else handles the third.

The 3-2-1 rule

The classic rule of thumb is three copies of your data, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy off-site. For a website that means the live site, a backup on the server for quick restores, and a copy with a different provider in case the server itself is lost.

How often, and how long?

Daily backups suit most sites. A busy shop may want more frequent copies of its database. Keep enough history to go back further than you would notice a problem: a hack is often discovered days after it happened, so a week or more of daily backups is a sensible minimum.

Test your restore

A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. Try a restore once, ideally to a staging copy, so you know how long it takes and that nothing is missing.

Backups on Netkeel

Every Netkeel server makes automatic backups of your sites, and you can restore any of them in one click. A backup is also taken before every staging push, so a bad deployment is easy to undo. For the off-site copy, download a backup from the panel regularly, or keep one with a storage provider you trust.