I have been around all of the sites I am hosting over the past 28 days and backed them all up and retained a local copy. All of the sites now have a new plugin installed called UpDraftPlus, this is a premium plugin which automates the back up of websites.
I mentioned this a few months back, I have now installed it everywhere. The plugin can be located under Settings and UpDraftPlus Backups.
It is possible to create an instant backup, however all sites should be backing themselves up and retaining the last 6 weeks’ worth of backups automatically. Bear in mind that if you have a large site, this will take up a lot of your hosting space. So in some cases you may have fewer than 6 backups.
If anyone is close to the limits I have extended the space at no extra cost.
Using Dropbox
In a few cases I have also set up Dropbox for new websites so that they back themselves up and keep a copy of the website somewhere else other than the hosting. It is free to open a DropBox account and you can use it for up to 2GB worth of space. If you are interested in having your site backed up to an independent location please let me know.
Helping yourself
I highly recommend that each administrator takes an occasional LOCAL backup of their site using UpDraftPlus. It is easy to into the settings and download the last backup, or initiate a backup and then save the files locally.
There are 5 files. With these files you can recover your website in the case of a failure of some form.
It’s not FOOLPROOF
You should bear in mind that a backup that is solely kept in the hosting may be of use in the event of a website failure, however if a site is hacked and defaced, this action may render the site useless and you can no longer get to your backup. Additionally in the case of a disk failure or something going wrong in the hosting (beyond your and my control), then the backup may also be lost.
For this reason alone, take a local copy periodically, particularly after some intensive updates have been completed.
Write a Procedure
I would recommend creating a procedure for your organisation which mandates that a Local copy of the website should be kept every month, or immediately on completion of some editing tasks if you do not edit your site too frequently. You also need to note where it should be kept.
What I hold on your behalf
I retain several copies of your website, but the period I back up the sites is around every 3 months. So if you do nothing, while we can always get the website online again, you may lose up to 3 months of changes.
There is also the hosting company that may hold a backup, however my experience has found that at best there is only one backup and it was in the last 24 hours. Restoring it is not that straightforward, particularly if a failure occurred more than 24 hours ago.
Restoring a site
In the event of any form of failure the process for recovering a site is broadly as follows:
- Delete the content of the hosting. Particularly necessary if a hacker got into your site, you have to assume that the site may now contains some modified files, so best to erase it all. In some cases I may delete the whole account*, and create a new account on your behalf, this ensures you get a clean start.
- Install an empty WordPress website from the hosting control panel.
- Upload the following Plugin: UpDraftPlus (the free version is available to everyone)
- Upload the back up files (generally there are 5 files)
- Restore the files. You can restore the site using the free version of UpDraftPlus if you are restoring the site to its original location.
*Note that in the event of major failure and the deletion and creation of a new account, you will lose your email accounts as well. These will need to be set up again.