Website Backup Strategies
Introduction
Developing a website backup strategy is critical to the overall success of your WordPress website. A backup strategy means that you have a cohesive plan for safely storing your website data. Combining a strong backup strategy with a strong website security plan and a plan to update your website and its plugins means that you will get years of productivity from your website.
We have compiled this list of website backup strategies for your consideration.
Website Backup Strategies
[1]Creating a website is a fun experience when things are going right. However, the experience can quickly turn sour if a problem arises with your WordPress website. For example, you may fall victim to a malicious hacker or succumb to corrupt data when installing a new theme or plugin. Or perhaps you made a change that you wish you hadn’t and now have no way of going back. Encountering your site problems can be frustrating, even more so when you have no idea how to restore it.
WordPress is normally a safe and reliable content management system for your website. But sometimes, despite all your precautions, something might go awry. Say you lose your website, how would you go about restoring it to its former glory?
Backups are the answer. They’re one of the best – and most reliable – defenses against any form of threat towards your site. With a regular backup schedule in place, all you have to do is restore your content, and you’re up and running again.
Why Do I Need A Backup Strategy?
[2]Sure, you might be able to get by without a backup strategy for your WordPress site until you can’t. Nobody expects things to go wrong, especially if they haven’t had it happen before.
Things do go wrong, though, and you need to be prepared, unless, of course, you like worrying about your website going down or freaking out while you try to recover priceless data.
A good backup strategy can help you sleep easy. It makes all the difference between getting your site back online in minutes and the possibility of starting over from scratch.
[3]How Do I Backup My WordPress Website?
Backup Strategy
Regardless of how you choose to back up your WordPress website, there are certain features that you should always look for. They help ensure that your backups are complete, current, and secure. After all, if your backups aren’t any one of those three things, you’re defeating the purpose of having backups in the first place.
Full Site Backup
Backing up your database is great. It’s also a good idea to back up your code and files. However, neither is enough. You need a backup strategy that provides full site backups covering both your database and your code and files.
WordPress is a big and often complex piece of machinery. All of the gears need to precisely fit with one another to turn freely and allow everything to move. Every data file and plugin configuration needs to be in sync. Otherwise, you will experience everything from random bugs and glitches to a full-blown failure of the site.
Scheduling
It’d be pretty terrible to have to remember to backup your website regularly. What if you forget? The best backup strategies and utilities offer the ability to schedule automatic backups. With automatic backups, your site will always have the latest backups available, and you don’t need to remember a thing.
Security Features
Your backups aren’t much good if they get compromised too. Having security built-in to your backup strategy can help protect your backups’ integrity and ensure that they’re readily usable if you need them.
First, encryption is a good thing. Encryption will not only help protect your backups from unwanted access; it’ll prevent your backups from being intentionally or unintentionally modified.
Malware scans and detection are also important. It’s not a great thing to back up malware. Make sure that both your installation and your backups are scanned regularly.
Incremental or Differential Backup
As their name suggests, incremental or differential backups detect differences from your previous backup and only backup those changes instead of rewriting everything each time.
Incremental backups obviously save time and resources on your server(s), but they also can provide backup points based on specific changes.
Incremental/Differential backups are faster than performing a full backup each time because there is much less data for the server to write. They also save a massive amount of disk space. To properly perform full backups, you need to save them for at least a few days. That means you need several copies of your entire site sitting around at any given time. On the other side of that, differential backups add and subtract from the same copy, saving multiple sites worth of storage space.
Off-Site Backup
If you have an issue with your server, you really don’t want your backups to be on that same server. It’d be terrible to lose your production install and your backups at the same time.
When you have a backup strategy that includes backing up your data to a different location, you don’t have to worry about losing your backups at the same time as your server.
Conclusion:
Do not delay in developing a website backup strategy for your WordPress website. Also, please take a look at our Top WordPress Backup Plugins blog (coming soon), so you may select the appropriate plugins to assist you in backing up your website so that you can be secure in knowing that your data is safe!
Should you need help in backing up your website, please call RapidPage today.
Written by hughesagency.ca
