The Surprising Truth about Website Backup and why you Need it

Remember your year 8 computer class? Your teacher continuously told you to hit the ‘save’ button each time you added or changed an element to ensure that your work wasn’t lost. Even in college while typing out that term paper under the pressure of an impending deadline, you clicked that disk symbol over and over, just to avoid losing your precious work. Well, as a website owner you have the very same responsibility to all the data on your website. You need website backup for your data and you need to do it now.

Managing your website has been made simpler nowadays, but don’t labour under false security, things can still go wrong.

“You can be hacked, you may delete important files by mistake, you could be held-up by ransomware software and those are just a few instances of what can happen.”

To safeguard your information and ensure that your website remains intact in the event that something like the aforementioned happens, you need to ensure you continually store and protect your website’s data.

So, what is Website BACKUP?

Simply speaking a website backup is simply creating a duplicate of all its content, should disaster strike. When you create a duplicate of your website and save it for safe-keeping and future retrieval, you coincidentally protect your site’s data. It’s that simple! In fact, websites are continually changing, so you want to ensure that you have an up-to-date version of your site, should you need to access this later. Therefore, you need to implement a website backup sequence. Not to worry, at the end of this article you will know exactly what you need to do to safeguard your website and its data.

Why should you do frequent Backups?

If your website grows daily and changes are made frequently then your backups should be done to match this. Imagine you have an eCommerce store with over 50 products. Each product has multiple pictures, you have customer account information that includes sensitive data like credit cards and addresses. All of this data need to be backed up frequently. As your site receives information that new data should be copied and backed up efficiently.

Who Needs Backup?

Everyone that owns a website, blog, e-Commerce store etc. should back their site up. Your business is your bread and butter, therefore you need to ensure that it is always able to function and available to customers, no matter what unforeseen issue comes its way. Frequent website backups make sure you never lose anything.

What are the most important things to know about Backup?

An excellent website backup solution needs to meet two criteria:

1. Backups are stored in more than one location. Never place all your eggs in one basket. Backup your backup.
2. They are created on a regular basis. As we said before, your backups should be frequent. As your site grows and changes daily, your backups should reflect this. Increase the frequency if you must, what do you have to lose?

What’s recommended is that you always keep a local backup on your computer or an external hard-drive and then one backup copy in a cloud. Don’t mind the redundancy here, having a several backups of your data ensures that you will always have a copy for your website data. Remember anything can go wrong and so it is indispensable that you have this that extra layer of security.

Just to reiterate, your backup schedule will need to reflect the frequency with which you update your website.

If you’re always publishing new content and getting lots of comments, you should consider weekly or even daily backups. If you don’t update things that frequently, you might get away with bi-weekly or monthly backups but frequency should match how often your website changes.

Now let’s get into the how of creating backups. We’re going to recommend 3 easy ways to ensure easy and seamless backups.

How to Create Backups

These three recommendations can function well on their own with addition to the local storage you should make on your computer or external hard-drive. Choose the best backup solution that suits your needs.

1. Backup Your Website to Cloud Storage

With Cloud Based Backup, you can customise backup data retention policy based on your company’s needs. You may choose to retain a copy of every single change on your server. Consider daily or weekly backups. Best of all, you can also opt for a logarithmic retention policy retaining more of the recent versions and less of the older ones. This is great news because it makes backups that much simpler. How can do this? Well, this specific Cloud Storage options is by Acronis back-up cloud. Acronis use military-grade AES 256-bit encryption to protect your data as well as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.

Cloud Backup Benefits:

Acronis cloud-based backup is a VPS and Server backup that website owners can use independently to schedule automatic backups, monitor website availability and performance, and restore lost or corrupted data in a single click. Learn more about cloud-based backup from one our previous articles.

We highly recommend this method as it is fully automated and makes it easier for you to schedule your backups at the frequency which suits your website.

2. Backing up Your WordPress Site with a Plugin

WordPress has a plugin for almost everything you can imagine. If you own a blog or website on WordPress then backing up is easy with a plugin like UpdraftPlus. Once installed UpdraftPlus is easy to use.

Once the plugin is activated, you’ll find a new tab under Settings in your WordPress dashboard. The UpdraftPlus control panel has several options, but its most important functions are plain to see: Backup Now, Restore, and Clone/Migrate.

Clicking on Backup Now will bring up a straightforward screen including a few settings: whether to include the database and files in your backup and the option to disable the remote storage option. We recommend leaving the settings as is and clicking on the Backup Now confirmation button.

Depending on the size of your site and server performance you may have to wait a minute or two, and your backup will be ready. It’s that simple! Restoring a backup is pretty easy too, just click on Restore and select one of your backups from the list.

3. Backup through your Host

Depending on your web host, you may have backup bundled with your hosting plan. Though, as a rule of thumb, never hesitate to ask when in doubt. Some hosts provide daily website backup to their servers for more stringent backup procedure. Plus you have the option to control the frequency and retention rate so, we recommend getting a backup solution. What’s more, you can customise the amount of space you need to suit your website’s size and budget.

Simply log into your hosting control panel to see what backup options you have in your tool box. Remember to set the frequency to automate the storage process.

Conclusion

Creating, storing and automating your backups is critical to managing your website and protecting its data. Backing up your data gives you a greater peace of mind, knowing that your website and all its information, files, photos and customer profiles are always safe no matter what comes your way.

If you do not have a storage plan in place for your site, the time is now. Choose one of the options mentioned above and protect your data. Now is the time to decide which website backup solution best suits your website. Again, you don’t want to lose everything and have to rebuild from the ashes. Your website is not a phoenix. Protect your data today.