Having regular and safe backups is crucial to your website’s security. Unfortunately, many website owners don’t realise it until it’s too late.
Backups are a last resort. If everything else goes wrong with the site whether it’s plugin installations gone wrong, site hacked or defaced, or simply someone overwriting content, it can all be fixed as long as there are frequent backups.
How often should backups be taken?
Ideally at least once a day. Many web hosts offer automatic daily backups but it’s good to check that the backups are complete and that they are in an accessible place should you ever need them.
Sometimes the host backups are of your entire account which leads to huge backup files. It’s better to have individual webapps/websites in their own backups to avoid data corruption.
Where should backups be stored?
Remote backups, i.e. backups not stored on the same server as your website are best. Many providers allow you to automatically upload your backups to the cloud such as Google Drive, Dropbox etc.
How to take backups?
There are plugins available for different CMS that can take backups and send them to remote servers etc. These can be handy but they also cause quite a lot of load on your site while the backups are being created and sent. It would be best to use a server-side method that creates incremental backups.
How does WP-Ensure handle backups?
For most plans we take backups twice daily using two different methods so we have a redundancy should one type of backup end up corrupt. Some of our plans include hourly backups and this is more important when content changes more frequently such as orders from an e-commerce solution or application.
How quickly can backups be restored?
We don’t often have to restore backups because there are a lot of other ways to get a website back on its feet. But on the rare occasion, we need to, our system backups can be very quickly restored, usually within 15 minutes of starting the process.
