How Backups Saved Our Client From A Costly Mistake
One of our clients has been with us on a regular maintenance plan for a while. Their site plays a big role in their business. It holds important content that they rely on every day to generate leads and sales.
One day, someone on their team made a simple mistake. While cleaning up content, they deleted a ton of content that was not meant to be deleted. At first nothing seemed wrong. The site still loaded. Other pages still worked. The day moved on.
It was only later, after a few more days of updates and changes, that they noticed something was missing. Some very important content was gone.
When They Realized Something Was Wrong
By the time they noticed the problem, several new backups had already been created. The client was worried that the deleted content was gone for good. Restoring the latest backup would not help, because that backup still reflected the missing data. Restoring a very old backup would bring the content back, but it would also wipe out recent work that they wanted to keep.
So they reached out to us and asked the question no one wants to ask. Can we get that content back without losing everything we did since then.
Because of how we handle backups, the answer was yes.
How We Used Old Backups Without Losing New Work
We do not rely on a single rolling backup. We keep a history of restore points. That means we can look back through older copies of the site when we need to.
For this client, we went back through backup points until we found a copy that still had the missing content. We did not restore that backup over the live site. Instead, we restored it in a separate environment, then carefully extracted only the data they needed.
After that, we brought that content back into the current live site, which still had all of the newer work. The client got their missing pages back and did not lose the updates they had made since the mistake.
From the outside, it looked like nothing changed. Behind the scenes, this could have been a very painful event. Instead, it turned into a huge, but quiet save.
The Lesson Behind The Story
This experience is a good reminder that not every problem comes from hackers or broken updates. Sometimes the biggest risk is a simple human mistake. Someone clicks delete. Someone overwrites a page. Someone removes content that turns out to matter a lot.
When that happens, a backup is only helpful if it is recent enough and flexible enough. You need to be able to go back in time, find the right version, and pull out only what you need. You also need to be able to do that without rolling back days or weeks of other work.
Good backups are not just about having a copy. They are about having options.
What This Means For Your Website
If your site is important to your business, it is worth asking a few hard questions about your backup plan.
- How often are backups created.
- How many old backups are kept.
- Has anyone tested restoring a backup recently.
- If you lost one page or one section, could you restore only that part.
If you do not know the answers, you are not alone. Many site owners assume backups are handled until the day they need them. That is not the best time to find gaps in the plan.
We like helping clients avoid that moment. A good backup plan can turn a very bad day into a minor bump.
🧩 Book a Meeting and let us review your backup setup with you. We can talk through what you have, what you might be missing, and how to make sure one mistake does not turn into a crisis.