Have you backed up today? My website is backing itself up this very minute. Do you think yours should be doing the same? Let’s find out.
According to Disaster Recovery Benchmark, 60% of companies who lose their data never manage to get it back.
If you’ve been running a website for a while, you might’ve found out that restoring a hacked or broken website often takes nearly as many resources as building it from scratch. And there are 2 things you to help you avoid such problems with your website: security and backup.
First, make sure your website’s protected enough in all possible ways. Use a decent security plugin or service and be careful with sensitive information.
Then, make sure both your database and files are backed up after every single change.
There are two types of backup: full-scale and differential.
Full-Scale Backup
This type of backup ensures that you have your entire database and all files saved each time. It takes a lot of storage but makes it pretty easy to restore everything with a single click.
Differential Backups
Use differential backups to save storage and only backup the changes made since your last backup job. This is a nice addition to a full-scale backup.
You can automate your backups with an easy-to-manage backup service, especially when you’re using a popular CMS like WordPress.
There are three major factors you should take into account when scheduling your backups:
- Frequency of website updates
- Frequency of user interaction
- Most visited hours
We’ll begin with the latter.
User Activity And Backup Hours
You can’t just go ahead and backup your website at any given moment. Technically, you can do it for sure. But the file upload might affect your traffic. This is why busy hours aren’t the best time to backup. Although, differential backup is fine at any time, as it’s much lighter. But for full-scale, schedule for the most passive hours, preferably nighttime.
If your users are also active commenters or contributors, you have to backup much more frequently.
Now, the big question is, how often should you set to backup your website? Let’s see all the options.
Optimal Backup Frequency
Monthly
Monthly backup is only acceptable for websites with no news/blog section and low to zero interaction. In such cases, more frequent backups look like a waste of storage space.
Once a month, you can save the key sections of your database that don’t change much.
Full-scale monthly backup is best for catalogs, menus, portfolios that you don’t update more than once every couple of months.
Weekly
Try this option if you post and update your content once or twice every month.
Basically, any site that has a blog needs weekly backups at least.
And don’t forget your visitors. Do they comment often? Do they fill out forms on your website? All of it has to be backed up and secured!
Daily
Daily backups are a must for websites that update once or twice a week. This is the most common frequency for scheduled automatic backups, especially the differential ones.
If you go for full-scale backups, don’t forget to set them up at nighttime or any other passive hours.
Real-Time
Any news website, government websites, ecommerce sites with frequent updates, blogs with lots of comments — they all need real-time backups to be secure. You can’t afford to lose several days of hard work because of a hacker attack or an error.
Real-time differential backup serves any website pretty well. You just get all your updates secured whenever you make them.
So, what schedule have you decided to choose? Just set up your backup service and automate all your backups. Trust me, knowing that your data is safe helps you sleep so much better.
Ani Barseghyan
Ani is the blog manager at 10Web — a platform for building, hosting, and managing WordPress websites. She’s been using WordPress since 2011 and writing about it for the last couple of years. You can always have a chat with Ani in the WordPress Family Facebook community.