There is a saying in IT that a file doesn't exist until it exists 3 times. In other words there is the file itself, then you have a backup, but then you also have a backup of the backup. This can be done with various methods, and usually there is a requirement to have at least one backup stored in an off site location, meaning that in the event of all your computers and servers in your office being destroyed, you could still recover all your data.
How does this work for websites? The first instance is your website itself. This lives on your web hosts server and the first backup should also be with your web host. All good web hosts provide daily backups as standard, so make sure that is in place and you should have a robust solution for when you need a quick reset to yesterday.
But what about a second backup. Just as in the case of a brick and mortar office, if something happens to your hosts server then you've lost both your live site and the backup in one fell swoop.
This is why I advise having an off-site backup solution in place to automatically take daily backups of your website. This way, if you have to build a site on a new server, you don't have to start from scratch, just upload the backup and you are up and running again with minimal fuss.
How likely is it that you'll need to use your off-site backup?
Is it likely that your web host's server will really lose all your data? Disasters do happen. Thankfully it is very rare, but there are more reasons to need an off-site backup than you might think
The obvious reasons are the same as for your usual office data. Fire and theft are potential risks for data centres just as they are for offices, and in such cases your live site and backup data is lost in one go. An off-site backup is essential to safeguard against such loses.
Equipment failure can also cause you to lose your data. Your web site files are stored on a hard drive, just as if your own laptop was acting as the web server. Your web host will have redundancy in place in the form of multiple hard drives sharing and duplicating the data between. The advantage of this is that if one hard drive fails, it can be swapped out for a new one, and the data can be rewritten from the other drives.
All well and good, and a good web host will have processes in place to make sure new drives are on hand and swapped out ASAP. But what if your web host doesn't have top notch processes in place? What if 2 drives fail in quick succession, perhaps while the first placement drive is still being shipped? When that second drive fails data loss is inevitable, so protect yourself and your site against other people's processes with an off-site backup.
And there is still the age old risk of the server being hacked and not cleaned up properly, or cross contamination from another site. This is common on cheaper hosting where your site and a number of others share one server. When one of the other sites gets hacked, all websites on that server become vulnerable. This is why we insist on managing updates for all sites on our servers, so a lapse in one clients updating procedure doesn't create a problem for others.
If the server does get hacked, you want to know that you can go back to a known clean version of your site, and start again on a new server, and this can only be assured if you have a backup stored on an unaffected server.
A good web host will have redundancies and safe guards in place, but do you want to rely solely on them or do you want to put extra safeguards in place that you have some control over? An off-site backup is an excellent way to create that extra level of security and can save the day when disaster strikes.
Do I Need Off-Site Backups if I Use a CDN?
CDNs work by storing copies of your website in multiple servers, each in a different location. They are designed to serve the website to the user from the nearest server, reducing the time it takes to load. This is particularly useful if your website server is in the US, but your clients and in the US and Europe. By having a copy of your website in many locations your US customers won't experience the lag of waiting for a request to travel to the UK to receive the website.
CDNs help with redundancy and performance, but they are not designed to replace an off-site backup. In many cases there will be extra resilience to help protect against loss of data, but the options won't be available to you the customer, and in most cases it is your own responsibility to backup and restore your own data.
So do you have sufficient backups in place? Do you have any stories to share in the comments of when a backup saved your bacon? Get in touch if you want to know the options that will work for your website, I'm always happy to point you in the right direction.
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