Backups & Recovery

Most small sites have a backup, but no plan for actually using it — write the decisions down before you need them, not during.

Often, in some form — but the specifics vary by plan and are worth confirming rather than assuming, and a copy of your own is still worth keeping.

It depends on the plan and can change over time — check the client area or ask support, and keep your own copy regardless.

Match the frequency to how much work a lost day would cost you — a shop needs daily, a brochure site can often go longer.

A backup you have to remember to run by hand eventually does not get run — here are three ways to automate it instead.

Email lives on a different system to your website, so it needs its own backup — here is how with an ordinary email client.

Files and database, taken together, kept somewhere other than the account they protect — here are three ways to manage both.

Before any update, plugin change, or risky edit, take one quick manual backup — it only has to undo this one change.

Generate the archive in your control panel, then pull the whole file off the account with FTP or SFTP rather than a browser tab.

Having a backup and having an off-site backup are two different things — here is how to actually achieve the second one.

Isolate the site, restore from a backup taken before the compromise, rotate every credential, and fix the entry point before you bring it back online.

Stop, work out exactly what is gone, then check for a backup before touching anything else — order matters here.

One missing or broken file rarely needs a full restore — pull that single file out of the archive instead.

The database half of a restore has its own tools and its own common errors — here is how to do it properly.

A restore overwrites the live site with the backup, so do it in the right order — here is what that order is.

Rolling back is a deliberate restore to a specific date, and everything created after that date is lost the moment you commit to it.

An untested backup is a belief rather than a safeguard — here is how to turn it into a fact you can rely on.

Three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one of them off-site — a decades-old backup rule that maps neatly onto a website.

A full backup is your files and your entire database taken together, and here is exactly what belongs in each half.

The default place a backup ends up is usually the one place it should not stay — here are the realistic alternatives.