Nearly every host includes backups, and nearly every host describes them in the same three words. The differences that decide whether they help you — how far back they reach, where they are kept, and whether anyone has tested a restore — are rarely on the feature list.
Three questions “daily backups” does not answer
- How much work can I lose? Daily snapshots mean up to 24 hours of it. For a site taking orders, that is a day of orders.
- How far back can I reach? Some problems are noticed immediately. Others — a bad import, a plugin quietly mangling data on save — are found weeks later, by which point short retention has already rotated past the last good copy.
- Where is the copy kept? A backup on the same machine as the site protects you from your own mistakes. It does not protect you from losing the machine.
Retention is the one people get wrong
Short retention is fine for operator error, because you notice within minutes and the copy you need is the most recent one. It is close to useless against slow corruption, where the damage predates every copy you still hold.
Thirty days is a reasonable default for most sites. If you run quarterly processes that touch data in bulk, you want at least one copy that outlives the quarter. Our plans keep thirty days, and backups are written off-site rather than onto the node the site runs on.
An untested backup is a hypothesis
The failure nobody plans for is the backup that ran faithfully every night and cannot be restored: a truncated database export, a missing uploads directory, a file the backup user could not read. You discover this during the incident, which is the worst available moment.
Restore to a staging environment once, deliberately, while nothing is wrong. Click through the restored copy. Then you know, instead of assuming.
What backups will not cover
Backups restore the site. They do not restore the domain registration, the DNS records, the mailboxes, or the payment gateway configuration. Keep those documented somewhere that is not the server. The technical recovery is usually quick; the hour spent reconstructing what the settings used to be is not.