Backups – you have an offline copy, right?

I like to roll this post out every once in a while, as a timely reminder – do you have offline backups of your website data? A complete backup of your website data, stored offline, not on our servers, that if you needed you could turn to, to restore your website to function?

Some of you might have been affected by last month’s disk failure on the WordPressVPS22 server. Thankfully our own in house backups (that run nightly on most plans) saved the day, and we were able to restore everyone’s data for the most part.

I say thankfully of course, as backup servers can have issues of their own, and we’ve had plenty through the years. There’s nothing worse than a client requesting their backup data, only to find a configuration error meant their backups were ineffective.

A solid offline backup is an essential part of your website’s long term success, and there are a number of ways to create one. You can use the WordPress Tools-> Export feature to create a very limited one (just your post data, no images) through to our own Snapshot tool that creates a full site backup for download and keeping offline.

As ever, our support team are here should you need us to advise on this critical item.