Why We Store Backups Offsite & Why You Should Too
We store our maintenance clients’ backups in secure offsite cloud storage, in this post I want to explain why we store backups offsite and why you should too.
The Problem That Makes Us Store offsite
A lot of the backup plugins available take a backup and then create an archive in the wp-content directory. The backup is stored in the same place as your website.
If the disk your website is stored on crashes, the archive is gone and you cannot recover.
If some mischievous hackers gets in and plans to deface your site and spots your backup archives, guess what, they will be deleted, I’ve seen it done. You cannot recover from that hack.
You need to keep your backup archives separate from the machine your website is on.
I’m having a flashback to the good old days of my corporate IT work, where I packed magnetic tapes into a fireproof case and lugged them to our remote site to store them in a safe, I’m so glad we can take advantage of secure remote storage with no physical media.
We take our backups then move them to a remote secure service, and, we do this automatically so we never forget to move our archives.
Don’t rely on your hosting company to have backups, many expect you to have your own backups and they won’t do a restore for you.
Where You Should Store Your Archives
Secure offsite cloud storage sounds expensive and complicated, but you probably already have some and weren’t aware of it.
You can store your archives on the following services:
- Drop box
- Google Drive
- Amazon S3
- iCloud
If you have one these services for your photos or to backup your pdf files, you can reuse this to save your WordPress backups too.
Plugins And Services That Store Archives Offsite
Here is a selection of free and premium plugins and services that store your archives off site.
BackWPup - https://wordpress.org/plugins/backwpup/
My favourite free backup plugin, you can create automate backups and store them to Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Google drive to name just a few of their offsite options.
VaultPress - https://vaultpress.com
VaultPress is a premium services made by Automattic, the people who brought you hits such as WordPress and Gravatar.
Regular backups are taken and stored offsite on their own infrastructure.
Backup Buddy - https://ithemes.com/backupbuddy
A premium plugin that give you options to store you backups on Backup Buddy Stash (their own infrastructure), Google Drive, Drop Box Amazon S3
ManageWP - https://managewp.com
A premium service to manage your WordPress sites that has a backup feature. It stores your backups on Amaxzon S3 servers, but it also has an option to save the archives to Dropbox or Google drive.
How We Do It
At the time of writing we look after close to 170 sites backups each day and we use Managewp. We take a daily full backup and store them offsite on Amazon S3 storage.
Certain clients want access to their archives, so we copy them to their Dropbox as well as our Amazon S3 storage.
Wrap Up – Why We Store Backups Offsite & Why You Should Too
In every post I write about backing up your WordPress site, I also add a short note on backups twin sister restore.
Having a backup archive is of absolutely no use if you don’t know how to restore it. If you don’t know how to download it from your cloud storage solution of choice and then restore that backup why bother.
Learn how to do a restore before you are under the stressful condition of having to do a restore for real.
“You are only as good as your last back!” as my old Gaffer used to say.
