How often do you backup your website?

I back my sites up daily using cPanel (argh), even though all material are on mirrored disks (redundancy).

Using cPanel/WHM gives me the option to backup off site at Amazon S3. Their free tier includes 15GB of data. However, it does include some restrictions such as data in and data out. With that being said, a small network of sites could be either free or relatively cheap (less than $10) to back up monthly. All you require is data in for the backup (free). Nevertheless, if you do need to expand, data out is fairly on the low side as well at 12 cents per GB up to 10 TB after your first GB (as backups generally include material that could get lost and wind up losing you money).

Another option if you don't have root access; rather a reseller or cPanel account, is to create a site backup and download it. A typical full backup for a minisite is anywhere from 50-120mb (probably because of catch-all's that I've setup).

I can download this directly from my cPanel account and upload it to my Google Drive account that also includes 15GB of free data.

In essence, if I wanted to store 30 GB of data, I could.

Though, I could have a hardware fail over (mirroring), backing up to S3, downloading and making a personal backup on my home computer(s) and cloud drives as well as using Google Drive for 15 GB of backup space.

I try to download or transfer out a new copy of my backups once every 2 or 3 days as I see that's when they normally operate and not much data would be lost in a catastrophic failure. I do not keep the backups on the same server, even with a fail over. I do keep backups on another server in the same data center, but even then, I am cautious to move them out.

My logic behind my backup procedure is that my websites make me money. If I were to lose data, I am losing money until I can find a solution to get it back (send my drives off to get the data recovered, if they can, etc. which would cost me even more).

I hope that helped answer your questions.

Twice a week on my Wordpress sites, using BackWPup plugin, and store all the backups automatically on Amazon S3.
For other sites i do it manually from cPanel, files and database, mostly twice a month, except for one important site i backup manually 3 -4 times a week, and then upload the backups on Amazon S3.

Then once a month i download all the latest 3 backups from Amazon S3 of all of my sites and store them on my local hard disk, replacing the old ones.

I have said and repeated how much backups are important to our customers that I logically take them very seriously myself. In a world where anything could go wrong, from the server hard drive, to a developer stealing your website or an application update breaking your site backups are detrimental.

I do my backups in accordance of how often am I editing my website. Basically once after each session I make, practically saving all the changes from that session. Have tried R1Soft and it works ok for me, as well as Backula. Now, depending on how the website is built, there are some pretty good backup plugins (like the mentioned BackWPup plugin for WordPress).

matrigaldo said:

BackWPup plugin, and store all the backups automatically on Amazon S3.

Click to expand...

Is that really a safe method for your data? Thinking "hijacking along the way" sort of

If the site you're gonna backup is REALLY important, i suggest you to make manual backups twice a week at least, it's the best solution.

Until now, i found this BackWPup plugin / Amazon S3 method useful, works fine and having near to no issues.

matrigaldo said:

If the site you're gonna backup is REALLY important, i suggest you to make manual backups twice a week at least, it's the best solution.

Until now, i found this BackWPup plugin / Amazon S3 method useful, works fine and having near to no issues.

Click to expand...

Yeah, will try your setup for the less important websites.

On topic: I do backup's almost daily on my most important site, the rest varies from once a week to once a month. Never store them on the same account/server, never using FTP either.

You can use separate Amazon S3 accounts, of course, any website has its own configuration.

I simply enable cPanel's daily backup for my personal sites.

I pay my Hosting provider to perform regular backup of VPS I have with them and the charge is pretty nominal.