Website Backups: How Often, Where, and How to Test Them

Back up your website often enough that losing everything since the last backup would only be annoying, not a disaster. For most sites that means daily. Keep the copies off-site, somewhere other than the server the site lives on, keep at least 30 days of them, and, the part almost everyone skips, actually restore one now and then to prove it works. A backup you have never tested is not a safety net. It is a guess you are making about a very bad day.

How often

Match the frequency to how much you would hate to lose.

• A site that takes orders or bookings, or changes often: daily, at least.
• A brochure site that rarely changes: weekly is usually fine.
• Always take a manual backup right before you update anything or make a big change.

The question to ask is: if the site broke right now and I had to fall back to the last backup, how much work would I have lost? If that number makes you wince, back up more often.

Where, and for how long

Two rules matter more than the tool you use.

Off-site. A backup stored on the same server as your site is worthless in the situations you most need it: the server gets hacked, fails, or is deleted by mistake. Keep copies somewhere separate, ideally cloud storage that is not tied to your host.

Enough history. Keep at least 30 days of backups. Hacks and corruption are often not noticed the day they happen, so you need to be able to reach back to a copy from before the problem started. A single "latest" backup that has already saved over the good version is no help at all.

How do I know my backup actually works?

This is the step that separates a real backup from a comforting illusion. Take one of your backups and restore it, to a test site or a staging area, and confirm the result actually loads and works. Do this occasionally, not just once.

People discover their backups are broken, incomplete, or missing the database at the worst possible moment: mid-crisis, when they finally need one. A backup you have restored successfully is worth ten you have only hoped about. If your host or plugin offers backups, do not assume they work. Prove it.

The parts people forget

A complete backup is more than the visible files:

1. The database. For most sites this holds your content, settings, and orders. A backup of files without the database is half a backup.
2. Uploads and media. Your images and documents.
3. A way to actually restore. Knowing where the backups are and how to put one back. A backup you cannot find or use is not a backup.

Backups are a core part of any maintenance routine, and they are the first thing you reach for when a plugin update breaks the site or after a hack.

What to do next

Find out, today, whether your site is being backed up: how often, where the copies go, and how far back they reach. If you cannot answer all three, that is your first job. Then do the thing almost nobody does: restore one backup to a test location and confirm it works. Twenty minutes now is a lot cheaper than rebuilding a lost site later. An audit includes checking your backup situation as standard.