Your Website Has a Backup. Are You Sure?

A business owner we've worked with for years called us in a panic a while back. They needed a backup of a website they'd taken offline months earlier, and they were sure one existed somewhere. If you've never had to check your website backup, it's easy to make the same assumption, and almost every owner we talk to does.

Everybody assumes there's a backup

We've never met anyone who believes their website has no backup. The host probably does something. The person who built the site probably set something up. There's a plugin in there somewhere with “backup” in its name. And for years none of that gets tested, because nothing goes wrong.

The truth is a lot of those assumptions are only half right. The host keeps a copy, but only for a few days. The plugin ran fine until an update quietly switched it off. The developer set it up, then the site moved to a new host and nobody set it up again. The backup exists right up until the day somebody goes looking for it.

What happens when nobody has one

In this case, the site wasn't one we were looking after day to day, and we weren't part of taking it down. If we had been, the very first step would have been a backup. So when the call came, we didn't have a copy, and neither did anyone else the owner could think of.

We did track one down in the end. It took a big part of a week, and it cost the owner a lot more than looking after the site ever would have. If that copy hadn't turned up, they would have been rebuilding from nothing. If somebody had been looking after the site all along, sending it over would have taken about two seconds.

It isn't only the dramatic stuff

Most of the time nobody shuts a site down on purpose. Somebody deletes the wrong page. A plugin update breaks the homepage on a Friday afternoon. A hacked plugin starts sending visitors somewhere strange, which is how a website ends up suddenly in Russian. Lately we've also been seeing a lot more security warnings about plugins than usual, so this isn't a hypothetical worry.

In every one of those, the backup decides whether it's a bad afternoon or a bad month. And it isn't only whether a copy exists. It's how fast the site can be put back, ideally before your customers notice anything happened.

How to check your website backup this week

This part is very fixable, and it doesn't take a new website or a big project. It mostly takes asking a few questions out loud.

First, find out who actually makes your backups. Ask your host, ask whoever built the site, and look in the site's dashboard for anything with “backup” in the name. If three people each think one of the others has it covered, that's your answer.

Second, find out where the copies live. A backup stored on the same server as the website can disappear along with the website if that server has a bad day. You want at least one copy somewhere else.

Third, find out how far back the copies go. A few days of backups won't help if the problem started three weeks ago and nobody noticed.

Last, find out whether anyone has ever restored one. A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a plan. Ask whoever is responsible to show you the most recent copy, with a date on it, and ask how long it would take to put the site back from it.

None of that is technical, and you don't need to know how any of it works. You just need somebody who can answer each question without guessing. We think about it the same way we think about insurance. It feels like an extra expense right up until the day it's the only thing that matters.

Business Owners, if your website disappeared tonight, do you know exactly where the copy is and who would put it back?