Backup your website content! That’s advice that many website owners hear but many also fail to heed. Backing up a site gives you peace of mind that you will not lose all of your hard work. Unexpected things can happen that can put even the most secure website or server at risk. Backing up can be automated, so it can be a task that does not take up extra time in your busy schedule once you have it set up.
You do have to know what you’re getting with a backup plugin for WordPress. With basic backup services, there is a risk that they only back up the website content, not the server settings. Typically no custom content that is stored outside of the WordPress folder is backed up.
Many WordPress hosting providers do offer backup services but they can be limited. Limelight Department’s server has server-level backups that offload backups to Amazon S3, so it does not take up disk space on the web server. And it’s very inexpensive, pennies per gigabyte per month.
If your web server crashes and your server settings are not backed up, you risk losing server configurations from your server. This could be important data such as sales orders, or DNS settings required for your email server.
Why you need server-level backups for your website
Backup plugins store their data in a folder on the WordPress site, so if your site is corrupted then those files will be too.
Server-level backups are backups that are taken on a server level, instead of through the website itself. This means the backup process is not dependant on your website being functional or even online. When using a WordPress plugin (plugin-level backup) the slightest issue could cause your backup to fail. If you receive a spike of traffic that your server can’t handle, or you face a permission issue writing the file, your backup will fail. You might not even know it failed until you really need that backup!
How often should you backup your site?
That depends on how often your site gets updated. If you blog daily, you might want to backup daily, or at least weekly. If your site only changes seasonally then perhaps a monthly or bimonthly backup would be sufficient.
If you are running a store where you take orders from customers on a daily basis, or receive any form of visitor information regularly, you definitely want at least nightly backups.
How many backups do you need?
It may seem paranoid, but you should keep several backups. Keep a copy on an external hard drive and, perhaps on a second hard drive that you keep in a different place.
How should you store your website backups?
Keep them safe. Backups contain highly sensitive information. You should password protect your backups if at all possible. Avoid storing backups on the website, as it poses a security risk in case your website faces intrusion, or a bot is able to snoop out and find your backup directory.
Recommended WordPress Plugins for Backups
UpDraft backups for WordPress – In our experience, this is the easiest to set up and use of all free backup plugins.UpDraft allows you to backup to the cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive or other places.
BackWPup WordPress backup plugin – Saves your complete WordPress site installation and pushes them to an external backup service that you can select.
If you have questions about how your backup works or want to switch to a host like Limelight Department with ongoing, server-level backups, give us a call! We’re looking forward to working with you. Our developers can evaluate your current site setup and make sure your needs are being met. Plugin configurations can be confusing. Let us know if you have questions about how these backups work.
