Website Backups - Do you do them?

[xReminisce]

Website Backups are one of the most important things any webmaster would do.

However, there are quite often times, I have stumbled upon users who simply don't have any backup copy of their website...
Not naming shaming anyone (@MrDenz looking at you buddy!)

Actually, to be honest, after my fiasco with Google Student Drives, some of my sites actually didn't get backed up properly (transferred, I am guessing my net died at some point lol).
And 2 of them, the website actually went down... one auto-updated to 6.0 and everything broke and the other had sql errors...wtf?
I was looking through all my emails and drives and storages and just could not find where I saved them.
I was pissed af, but... my hosts told me, they take care of it as they had backups for them and took care of it & didn't charge a cent!
(Praise the good web hosts)

Anyways, considering alot of us have more than just 1 site.
Some sites are heavy with images, videos and what not

What methods do you use to backup your sites?
Do you just blindly trust the host's backup tools?
Or do you do your own backups?
If you do your own backups, where do you save them all?
How many versions do you keep?

 

[awesomewebsites]

Sometimes hosting does this as some additional cost.

 

[Dopious]

Backups are for pussies, of course I backup my sites. I use ManageWP for all my backup needs .. =)

 

[Marshmello]

I use WPVivid PRO, and keep my backup on multiple sources, root cpanel, drive, and others.

 

[Deleted member 1501362]

Maybe this is a sign that I need to backup my sites, let me get to backing up my site asap before anything happens. Do you want to plug your hosting? they sound like really good people.

 

[xReminisce]

Do you want to plug your hosting? they sound like really good people.

The two that had issues
Rocket was one of them
The other was shared hosting from @kvchosting
I don't usually have shared hosting, but I had a plan with them for awhile so why not use what I already paid for.
They give me their fair amount of issues, but they are decent for the price I paid for. Although I would probably not renew at this stage (Rather put them in rocket instead!).

@Marshmello @RoiBox do you trust them enough to have your Backup files on their servers though?
Data sensitivity, uptime when needed, risk of being hacked etc?

I just do the old fashion way,
automated wp backup plugin -> cloud drive -> automation moved to password protected folder -> manual download any "pre"-updates (like pre-6 WP) and encrypt them -> delete anything I don't need.

idk, feels like I am overcomplicating my life
i probably am

 

[N1ckG2]

softaculous works quite well for me. Almost all hosts offers it. Most of them keep one backup only for several days but I either backup on external storage S3 or similar, or copy softaculous file with a simple cron task run just after the backup is complete.

 

[Dopious]

@RoiBox do you trust them enough to have your Backup files on their servers though?
Data sensitivity, uptime when needed, risk of being hacked etc?

Yes, I have no problem with that. There are backups on my hostings servers to .. I don`t run some payment service or so with highly secure sensitive data .. Don`t complicate stuff, if you do not need to.

 

[Marshmello]

WPVivid doesn't backup the files to their server, it's just a plugin that allows you to backup and restore from GDrive, Dropbox, pCloud, OneDrive, Amazon S3, FTP, Wasabi, Backblaze Storage, and more..

 

[xReminisce]

softaculous works quite well for me. Almost all hosts offers it. Most of them keep one backup only for several days but I either backup on external storage S3 or similar, or copy softaculous file with a simple cron task run just after the backup is complete.

I don't have a panel installed on most of them so that wouldn't work haha

WPVivid doesn't backup the files to their server, it's just a plugin that allows you to backup and restore from GDrive, Dropbox, pCloud, OneDrive, Amazon S3, FTP, Wasabi, Backblaze Storage, and more..

Ah so basically the same thing as the one I have what's its name UpdraftPlus or something.
Make sense then.

Yes, I have no problem with that. There are backups on my hostings servers to .. I don`t run some payment service or so with highly secure sensitive data .. Don`t complicate stuff, if you do not need to.

I do deal with some sensitive data & I like to be safe

You can blame @VSYNC really.
Making me go through the whole Encryption for everything, security protection phase

 

[Ashk881]

What methods do you use to backup your sites?

small scripts that run on a cron job.

For WordPress sites, i got a script that dumps the MySQL db and does an incremental backup of the wp_content/ folder with a tool called rysnc.

Do you just blindly trust the host's backup tools?
Or do you do your own backups?

As any sysadmin would tell you, having a "zero trust policy" in place is usually a good idea. And it's not about Trust, it's about backup frequency.

Your host would tell you that they backup your website at no extra cost but that can mean a rotating single backup that gets overwritten every 24 hours.

Now if you get some malware/broken dependency which very likely is also in the last backup of your host, and you don't have your backup from, say a week or month ago, that did not have that problem, you are basically fucked. Your webhoster backup in this case is basically useless

If you do your own backups, where do you save them all?

One gets stored on a hard drive at home. It's connected to an old computer that's always on and connected to the internet. I use it as a homeserver and it syncs the wp_content folder and downloads the MySQL dump.

Another gets uploaded to AWS S3 Glacier and Google Drive. The backup is usually less than 15 gigs so it's easy.

How many versions do you keep?

The cron job is set to run daily. I keep 4 versions of every weekend during a month in the homeserver.

The S3 Glacier bucket keeps the backup of every day for 3 months.

 

[MaxiJazz]

Vultr snapshots baby! Keeps everything safe, not only the site, just in case the server goes berserk.

 

[K-One]

I use WPVivid PRO, and keep my backup on multiple sources, root cpanel, drive, and others.

Have you checked out Updraft? It’s really quite good too.

 

[daddyscaz]

Website Backups are one of the most important things any webmaster would do.

However, there are quite often times, I have stumbled upon users who simply don't have any backup copy of their website...
Not naming shaming anyone (@MrDenz looking at you buddy!)

Actually, to be honest, after my fiasco with https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/eff-you-google.1409305/, some of my sites actually didn't get backed up properly (transferred, I am guessing my net died at some point lol).
And 2 of them, the website actually went down... one auto-updated to 6.0 and everything broke and the other had sql errors...wtf?
I was looking through all my emails and drives and storages and just could not find where I saved them.
I was pissed af, but... my hosts told me, they take care of it as they had backups for them and took care of it & didn't charge a cent!
(Praise the good web hosts)

Anyways, considering alot of us have more than just 1 site.
Some sites are heavy with images, videos and what not

What methods do you use to backup your sites?
Do you just blindly trust the host's backup tools?
Or do you do your own backups?
If you do your own backups, where do you save them all?
How many versions do you keep?

Dor wordpress i use all in one wp migration and for non wp i just download all files and database onc ein few months

 

[code API]

I use Updraftplus + Amazon S3 = automagical backup solution. Can't go wrong baby!

 

[TheRedRabbit]

Always make sure to have backups. I use backblaze to store mine.

 

[Deleted member 752298]

I personally use BlogVault and Runcloud for external instant backups

 

[DrZoidberg]

There are two types of people in the world - ones that don't do any backups and ones that now do backups after they have lost a website

All good hosting providers offer backups - sometimes for free or a couple of bucks per month. This is the easiest way and a small price to sleep well.

There are some Wordpress plugins that do backups but often you need to do them manually (which you will forget). Ideally, you want to figure out a solution that will do backups automatically once per week or so and just deploy it to all of your sites

 

[atooxi]

I was thinking about backuping my site this is a sign thanks

 

[TheMarquis]

I create backups for each and every site, and I save one weekly/monthly backup on my computer (it depending on how important is that website, how often is updated, and so on).

Few years ago, the entire server of my hosting provider was wiped. No backups, no recovery options, only excuses. That day I learned a good lesson.