A website backup is a copy of your website files and data usually compressed and stored in one or more files. The website data usually comes from a database and is stored in a separate file when backed up. If the website is large enough it may be stored in multiple compressed files for easier management.

Depending on the size of the website and how the backup is being performed, it can take just a minute or so to complete, or up to several hours.

Why Website Backups are Needed

A website backup is a safety net for restoring your website if it’s compromised by software issues, human error, security issues like hacking, or hardware issues. Restoring a backup for an average website takes about 5 minutes. This ensures minimal downtime and data protection.

Software Issues

Bugs found in software either at the server level or for the actual website can cause errors and data loss or corruption which can take down the website. Likewise, software updates at either level can cause similar issues.

When this happens it’s usually much easier to restore a backup than try to hunt down the cause of the problem and fix it.

Human Error

Humans are well… human and make mistakes. There are many reasons when we make one that we might want to restore a backup.

  • Data can be deleted by accident or through misunderstanding of how a feature of a website works
  • Incorrect website settings could cause a website to self destruct and go down
  • Deleting or updating files

The more people with higher security levels that use the website, exponentially increases the chances of this problem happening.

Security

All websites are under constant attack by bots 24 hours and 7 days a week. Most websites receive hundreds of attacks a day. With more popular websites, this number rises exponentially. These bots are looking for vulnerabilities that can be used as backdoors to gain greater access and infect your website. There are a lot of security measures you can take to protect a website, but nothing is 100% foolproof.

Most hacks look to install scripts (called malware) on your website to gain greater control to:

  • Deface the website,
  • Steal data
  • Use the server resources of the website to cause havoc elsewhere on the internet
  • Take down the website

These scripts can live as files or data on your server.

If your website is ever infected with malware, having a backup is probably the best solution to restoring the website to a point before the infection happened.

Just remember to also find out what the security hole was that the bot used to infect the website in the first place and fix it or the website will just get reinfected.

Hardware Issues

Website server hardware is extremely resilient, but it can still fail. If this happens it can cause data corruption or in some cases complete loss of data (if the storage solution fails completely). In this case your only solution is to restore a backup on another web server.

While a lot of hosting companies may reference the cloud, your website still most likely resides on one computer and can be easily wiped out if a hardware failure occurs.

Backup Redundancy

Now you see why a website needs backups, lets look at how to implement a system so you can ensure you have the right backup for the right situation.

The key to backups is redundancy. Sometimes a website issue which requires a backup to fix is not found right away and you may need to go back several weeks or months to get the backup you need to restore the entire website (or part of one).

That is why eSilverStrike Consulting for there management service plan have setup 2 automated backup systems and a manual one.

Automated Backups

We have 2 automated backups that stores the data off-site. This means the data is not stored locally with the website but somewhere else.

The first one we have, and the best backup method is at the server level. This means the backup is performed by the server and backups all the files and data outside the influence of the website. This is the quickest way to perform a backup and has the added benefit of not taking resources away from the website itself (unless the server is completely overloaded). These backups are then uploaded to a secure cloud drive. This backup is usually done daily (depends on the website and how often it is updated)

Our second method for automated backups is using a WordPress plugin. This allows the website to backup itself and then store the files either locally on the server or on a cloud drive. We store ours on a secure cloud drive that is a different provider from the first method.

Both backup methods are set to store at least the last 30 backups.

While it may seem strange at first having 2 automated backups using different methods, this adds redundancy. It protects the website in case:

  • The backup software receives an update that has a bug which could result in all new backup files to be corrupted.
  • If backups get corrupted during transfer to the cloud drive, the drive itself becomes inaccessible, or if something happened to the files on the cloud drive

Manual Milestone Backups

Anytime we make a significant change to a website we perform a manual backup and store it locally. These backups are also stored in the cloud and as an extra precaution backed up to an external hard drive. This means at every major milestone we have a copy of the website.

We also periodically (usually every month or so) store one of the automated backups locally.

Testing Backups

Every week we ensure that the backups scheduled for the past week has been performed. While we should get email notifications if a backup fails, it is an extra measure of protection by manually reviewing and making sure the files exist.

Every once in a while, it is important to test restoring your backups. You want to ensure your backup system and processes work, and nothing has gotten corrupted. You do not want to discover something is wrong when you need an actual backup to restore the website.

Restoring a backup should be done for every method you have of backing up the website. We do perform this task monthly for each method.

Cost of Doing Backups

Relatively speaking when compared to building the website, backups are cheap to do. They still have a cost though:

  • Monitoring the backups to ensure they have been completed
  • Backup software costs
  • Storage cost of the backups
  • Testing backups

In Conclusion

While we never want to use one, having backups is an important part of managing and operating a website. If the time comes when you need a backup you will sure be glad to have one.

Here at eSilverStrike Consulting, one of the many things our management service plan does, is taking care of all the backups and restoring for you.