How Often Should I Take a Backup?

The question you should ask yourself is “how much work do I want to re-do if something goes wrong?”.

As a business owner you never want to be in a situation where you lose content or data.

It is easy to assume that because you run regular backups your site will always be safe – but what if you’re not running them often enough? Or you ran a big update, but didn’t backup afterward?

It happens too often and really could have been avoided with a few clicks. Don’t be one of those website owners that curses themselves for not doing a complete backup of WordPress site content!

How Frequently Should you Backup Your Website?

Simple answer…when you update your WordPress website in any way including:

• Changes to WordPress version, theme updates, plugin updates
• Or developmental or layout changes
• Or adding or editing content; text, images, files, changing shopping cart data such as pricing or descriptions

Best practise is to always take a full backup to your local disk – your computer or external hard drive.

Some things you may not think of…

• Themes and plugin updates and new installations could, and sometimes do, break part of your site.
  Update regularly…outdated sites are a security risk as discussed in this article.
• If you or your developer plays around with the WordPress coding, this could also break parts of your site. This altered code could be fine until you update a plugin – a shopping cart plugin for example that just does not like your code alterations. If you have a backup you can restore it, then work on the site off line in a test environment to ensure the new update works with your code tweaking.
• Do not assume your web designer or developer will have a good regular backup process. They are often too busy to do this type of ‘basic’ stuff. They may be good at backing up before working on the core design of a site or a major revamp, but make sure they backup when doing any work on it – even small content edits. It’s a great idea for them to give you a written ongoing maintenance plan.
• Limit development access to your site. Too many cooks can spoil the broth. And not all cooks take regular backups! Perhaps start a backup register. Good habits.
• Often web designers and developers move on, or are not contactable for many weeks or months. So you the business owner should have regular backups in your possession in case you need them. Your host then may be able to assist restoring the backup.
• Lastly, unfortunately a soured developer-business owner relationship can get nasty. As the business owner you need to have a contingency plan and have a recent backup.

Still find yourself up the creek without a paddle?

Your hosting provider may have at least one fairly recent backup as part of their process. Some charge for it, some don’t.

NewSprout take regular backups of all sites hosted on our servers using R1Soft and we can save your bacon on most occasions, but don’t rely on us….take a backup yourself!

Worst case scenario get in touch and we should be able to help you out with a restore. Or you can access backups via our cPanel NewSprout Backup link.