How to check a website backup actually works
A backup has to do three things to count, and the third one is the one nobody has tested. Here are the questions to ask.
If your website disappeared tonight, could you have it back by tomorrow?
Most people say yes, because there is a backup somewhere. There usually is. What has often never happened is anyone taking that backup and rebuilding a working site from it, which is the only test that proves anything.
The three things a backup has to do
It has to exist, it has to be recent, and it has to restore. Those are separate properties and a backup can pass the first two while failing the third.
Restores fail for dull reasons. A scheduled job stopped months ago and nobody was watching the report. The files were saved but the database that holds every page of content was not. The archive is there but it is corrupt. The copy lives on the same server as the site, so a hosting failure takes both at once. None of that shows up until the day you need it, and that day is a bad day to start finding out.
The conventional shape of a safe setup
The long-standing convention is called 3-2-1: three copies of the data, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else entirely. For a small business website it comes out roughly as the live site, a backup held by the host, and a copy somewhere off that host.
The off-host copy is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters when the failure is the host rather than the site.
Four questions
Ask whoever looks after your site, or ask your host directly if that is you:
- Where are the backups stored, and is that somewhere separate from the site itself?
- How often are they taken? Weekly is a reasonable floor for a site that changes rarely. Daily if you post or take bookings.
- Do they include the database as well as the files?
- When did anyone last restore one and confirm the result worked?
The fourth question is the real one. If the answer is never, you do not have a tested backup, whatever the control panel says.
Testing without risking the live site
You do not restore onto your live site to test a backup. You restore onto a staging copy, which is a private duplicate of the site that nobody else can see, and check the pages and the content are all there. Most decent hosts can create one on request. Half an hour, once a quarter, is enough to know rather than hope.
Every care plan includes weekly backups that get restored and checked rather than just taken. What each plan covers is set out on the care plans page.