A backup is a saved copy of your website, its database and your email that you can return to if something goes wrong. It turns a disaster into an inconvenience.
When you will be glad you had one
- A plugin or theme update breaks your site.
- Someone deletes the wrong page, product or email folder.
- The site is hacked and files are changed.
- A developer makes changes that go wrong.
What a complete backup includes
- Files: themes, plugins, images and uploads.
- Database: for WordPress, your pages, posts, orders and settings.
- Email: mailboxes and their folders.
- Settings: DNS records and cron jobs.
How often?
Daily for most business sites, and more often for busy online shops. Keep several days of history, because problems are not always noticed straight away. Our hosting plans include daily backups.
The 3-2-1 rule
For important sites, keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of storage, with 1 copy off the server. For example: our daily backups, plus a weekly copy you download or send to cloud storage with a backup plugin.
How to restore
- Decide what you need: the whole site, one file, the database, or a mailbox.
- Choose the date of the last good copy, before the problem started.
- Open a ticket with the domain, what to restore and the date. We will help.
- After restoring, change passwords and update plugins if the problem was a hack, so it does not happen again.
Test your backups
A backup you have never tested is a hope, not a plan. Once in a while, restore a copy to a test location or ask us to check that your backups are complete.
Read next: how to secure your WordPress website.