You are only as good as your last backup!

That’s the phrase that was drilled into me over and over when I was a young systems engineer looking after huge corporate databases.

Backup was such an important thing to us, we had rotas where it was someone’s sole job was to ensure backups were taken, they were valid and they were stored correctly.

Part of that storage was to bundle up magnetic tapes into a fireproof box and send it offsite to a secure storage location.  It was physically offsite.

As the owner of a WordPress site you need to ensure your backups are also stored off site but in the sense they are stored virtually off your website.

The Majority Of Backups I See

You do have a backup plugin installed don’t you?

The majority of the backup plugins I see installed are taking backups each day or each week.  These backup archives are then stored locally under wp-content.

Why Store Offsite

Let me paint a doomsday scenario.  Your site has crashed.

All of the files on your site have been deleted.

Your archives are gone.

Your hosting company cannot help you.

You are stuffed!

That’s why we keep a copy of your archive offsite so we can restore in a worst case scenario situation.

Off Site Storage Options

Your offsite storage options will be dictated by the backup plugin you use, but here are some of the more common options:

Dropbox – not only can you save the pictures from your phone but you can also save you backups there too.  Large sites can be into the GB sized archives

Amazon S3 – the good folk at Amazon not only sell you everything under the sun, but you can also rent part of their storage too.  It’s cheap and secure.

Microsoft Azure – always late to the game it seems, but Microsoft have storage solution too.

FTP – You can setup a manual process to FTP your archive files to a second location offsite.  Not my preferred method but definitely.

Email – if your archive is small you can attach it to an email and send it to yourself each day.  Gmail for example, only allows a max file attachment of 25MB, so email will not be the best for a large site.

Recommended Plugins/Services

Here are some plugins that offer an offsite storage solutions that I recommend.

• Backwpup – free
• BackupBuddy – premium plugin
• Managewp – freemium service
• Vaultpress – premium service.

What We Do For Our Clients

We manage the backups for hundreds of our clients, we take a daily full backup of their site and we store it off site on Amazon S3 servers.  The backups are secured and encrypted.

We get to select where, geographically we save the backups, so we store them as close to the clients physical location as possible.  We can select Amazon data centres in North America, Europe, the Far East or Australia.  This speeds up upload and restore times.

We’ve had to restore from this solution numerous times and it works.  That’s the important part of backup, not taking a backup, not saving it offsite, being able to restore when the SHTF.

Wrap Up – Why You Need To Store Your Backup Archive Off Site

I would like you to review your backup solution today and make sure you are also storing you backups offsite, you will thank me if things go pear shaped.

We have backup solutions starting at $9 per month, can we backup your site for you?  Get in touch.

Photo Credit: Dave ‘FBI’ Gibbons Flickr via Compfight cc