Data backups: why, how often and with what

There are plenty of situations in which your site can come to harm, and it need not be an attacker behind it. A site owner can just as easily delete files by accident or install an update that costs them data. And of course a site does sometimes simply get broken into.

Picture the situation: you open your site's home page and find a crowd of pop-up advertising banners and similar spam. That is the classic result of a break-in. Can a virtual disaster be prevented and everything put back the way it was? It can, if you back your data up. Once a web resource has been compromised, a backup is the only way to save the situation.

What is a backup? The term covers the automatic or manual duplication of information so that the data can later be restored if it is damaged or destroyed outright. Why does making backups matter, how often should you do it and when? That is what this article is about.

Why and when to make a backup

Sometimes it feels as though everything is going to plan and no unforeseen difficulty should arise. And then the human factor enters the game: an inexperienced content manager clicks the wrong button and deletes a crucial file, or takes the resource offline for an indefinite time. You lose money on the downtime, management is cross, clients are nervous. A thoroughly unpleasant situation that nobody wants to find themselves in.

Other weighty reasons not to forget about backing a site up:

1. Updates that break something because new plugin versions turn out to be incompatible. On the one hand, plugin and CMS updates cannot be skipped. On the other, nobody guarantees that nothing will break, and hunting down the cause can eat a great deal of time. So a backup is the best way to avoid unforeseen problems.
2. Viruses and malware. Most viruses are not out to destroy a site completely. More often their purpose is to hand an attacker personal data or whatever information they are after. Malware can reach a site when themes and plugins are downloaded from dubious sources: install those, and you risk third parties gaining access to your site. Having a backup guarantees that the previous version can be restored without errors.
3. The chance of a break-in. If you use an open-source CMS, that chance is higher. Installing updates promptly reduces the threat, of course, but not everyone does so in time. And let us not forget that updates often appear after some large-scale break-in, to close a hole in the security that is already being used.
4. Hardware failures or software errors. You have saved the site backup to a separate hard drive? That is good, but clearly not enough. Better to create several copies — two or three, say. Better still is remote storage: keep the backup somewhere other than the server your site runs on. That way a failure on the server will not take all the data with it.

How often and when should a site be backed up?

We recommend daily backups, because that is the principle we work by ourselves. For every client on our hosting, a data backup runs automatically every day. That is why we are confident that all our clients' data is properly protected.

We also advise checking that the site still works after every update. Rolling out new functionality? Do look at how it renders in different browsers, how messages are sent from the site, how items are added to the basket and so on.

Always make a backup in these cases:

1. updating the CMS and the site's modules;
2. adding new content;
3. rolling out extra functionality.

Creating and storing a backup is only half the job — what matters is that the site can actually be restored from it. Always test that your copies work, using software that emulates a server.

The best WordPress backup plugins

WordPress backup plugins let you save all the data from your site regularly. They are simple to use and quite effective. Here is a brief description of the best of them:

1. UpdraftPlus. Simplifies both making and restoring backups. Copies can be kept in cloud storage, and restoring takes one click.
2. XCloner. Suits web resources running on PHP/MySQL. Restoring happens automatically, through a script the developers supply.
3. BackWPup Free. Built for creating full backups along with the file structure.
4. Backup Rocks. A free cloud service that records any number of changes to the site's structure. It lets you create something close to a real-time clone of the site.
5. WordPress Backup. Flexible backup settings.

One more way to keep your data safe is backup hosting.

You can order it from us. It is a safe way to store personal and commercial information: it will not fall into third-party hands or be damaged while stored. Our support team will help with any technical questions that come up.