Almost every site owner will tell you they have backups. Far fewer can tell you when the last one ran, where it's stored, or whether it has ever been restored. That gap is where the pain lives.
The four things a real backup needs
Automated. A backup that depends on someone remembering to run it will be out of date exactly when you need it. It has to happen on a schedule with no human in the loop.
Off‑site. If the backup lives on the same server as the site, a server failure, a compromise, or a billing lapse takes both. The copy needs to be somewhere else entirely — a different provider, ideally.
Versioned. You don't just want a backup, you want yesterday's, last week's, and last month's. Some problems — a bad plugin update, a quiet hack, a content mistake — aren't noticed for days. If your only backup is from this morning, it already contains the problem.
Tested. This is the one everyone skips. An untested backup is a file you hope is a backup. Until you've actually restored it somewhere and seen the site come back, you don't know.
The scenarios backups are actually for
People picture a dramatic server explosion. In practice, the restore button gets pressed for:
- A plugin or theme update that white‑screens the site.
- An edit that deleted the wrong thing, noticed a week later.
- A compromise where you need a known‑good version from before the intrusion.
- Moving hosts, where the backup is the migration.
- A staff member leaving and taking undocumented knowledge with them.
Only one of those is an emergency. The rest are Tuesdays.
A sensible setup for a small site
- Daily automated backups of files and database.
- Stored with a different provider from your host.
- Kept for at least 30 days, so you can go back further than "this week."
- A restore tested once, when it's set up, and then again if anything major about the hosting changes.
That's not expensive or complicated. It's just something that has to be deliberately set up once, because it never sets itself up.
The one question to ask your provider
"If the site broke right now, what's the newest copy you could restore, and how long would it take?" If the answer is vague, you have a backup problem — and sorting that out is cheaper than the alternative.