Where to keep your backups

The default place a backup ends up is the account it was taken from, because that is where the tool that made it happened to save the result. That is also the one place it should not stay, permanently, on its own — because whatever eventually threatens the live site is well placed to threaten a backup sitting right next to it too. This is about the physical and logical location of your copies: where the files actually live, not how many of them you keep.

Option 1: on the hosting account itself

Fast to create and fast to restore from, because nothing has to travel anywhere. This is where most automated backups land by default, and there is nothing wrong with using it as your first copy — for a quick rollback after a bad update, it is genuinely the best option, since restoring from the same account is quicker than pulling a file down from elsewhere first.

The limitation is specific: it protects you from mistakes, not from anything that affects the account as a whole. A compromised set of credentials, a billing dispute, or a hardware fault at the account level puts the backup at exactly the same risk as the site it is meant to save you from. Keep one here, but never only here.

Option 2: your own computer or an external drive

Complete independence from the hosting account, and complete control over the copy. The trade-offs move to your side of the connection instead: a laptop can fail, be lost, or be stolen, and a manual download only stays current if someone actually remembers to repeat it. Two small habits fix most of that — automate the download or sync rather than relying on memory, and keep the local copy on a drive you would not lose to the same event as your other data, such as an external drive rather than the same machine as everything else.

Option 3: cloud storage

For most small and medium sites, this is the most practical off-site option, because it is straightforward to automate. A scheduled job on the server, or a backup plugin configured to do it directly, can push each new backup to a cloud storage account the moment it is created, with no manual step for anyone to forget. It is reachable from anywhere, and it is physically and logically separate from the hosting account by design.

The new thing to secure is the cloud account itself. It is now holding a copy of your entire site, so protect it the way you would protect the hosting account — a strong, unique password and two-factor authentication where it is offered. A backup that is off-site but sitting behind a weak, reused password has just moved the single point of failure rather than removed it.

Option 4: a second server

The most thorough form of separation, and mostly relevant once a site is business-critical enough to justify it, or where you are managing infrastructure for several sites at once rather than one. Pushing backups to a different server — potentially with a different provider entirely — means no single infrastructure failure, however unlikely, can touch every copy you have. For most single-site owners this is more redundancy than the risk justifies; for an agency or reseller managing client sites, it is worth serious consideration.

Choosing quickly, if you have not decided yet

If none of the above has settled it for you, the deciding factors are usually simple: how much technical setup you are willing to do, and how expensive losing the site would actually be. A brochure site with no shop attached loses little by starting with just an automated on-account backup plus an occasional manual download — it is not the ideal end state, but it is a real improvement over nothing, and it can be upgraded later. A site that takes payments or holds customer accounts is worth the extra half hour to automate a cloud sync from day one, because the cost of getting this wrong scales with what the site actually does.

What actually matters is independence, not the label

None of these options is "correct" in isolation — what matters is that your copies do not all depend on the same thing staying healthy. That is the whole idea behind the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies, spread across at least two kinds of storage, with one of them off-site. The options above are simply what "two kinds of storage" and "off-site" actually look like once you get specific.

A sensible default for most sites

Set the first two up to run automatically and you have satisfied the meaningful parts of a sound backup location strategy without a single recurring task on your calendar. Moving backups off your hosting account covers the practical steps for getting the second copy in place, and automating your backups covers wiring the whole thing together on a schedule.