Automatic Backup: Your Digital Life Insurance

Automatic backups are the most important insurance policy for your website. Without them, any technical problem, attack, or human error could result in the total loss of your work. We have seen businesses lose years of content, customer data, and sales because they didn't have a proper backup system.

In our WordPress maintenance services, automatic backups are a fundamental part of every plan. Here we explain everything you need to know to protect your site.

Why Are Backups Important?

Backups protect you against situations that occur more frequently than you might think:

• Malware attacks and hackers: 30% of WordPress sites will experience some form of attack attempt
• Human errors: accidentally deleting content or changing critical settings
• Server failures: hard drives that fail, hardware problems
• Problematic updates: an updated plugin or theme can break your site
• Database corruption: data that gets damaged by server interruptions
• Ransomware: attacks that encrypt your files and demand a ransom

Types of Backup

Full Backup

Includes all WordPress files (core, plugins, themes, uploads) and the complete database. It is the most secure but also the heaviest. We recommend doing a full backup at least once a week.

Incremental Backup

Only saves files that have changed since the last backup. It is faster and takes up less space. Ideal for daily backups between weekly full backups.

Database Backup

Only backs up the MySQL database that contains all your content, settings, users, and comments. It is small and fast, and should be done daily at minimum.

Best Practices for Backups

1. Total Automation

Never rely on manual backups. Set up daily automatic backups for active sites with frequently changing content, and weekly for more static sites. Automation ensures you will always have a recent backup without having to remember to do it.

2. External Storage (3-2-1 Rule)

Follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of storage, with 1 copy offsite. Store your backups in external locations like:

• Google Drive (15 GB free)
• Dropbox (2 GB free)
• Amazon S3 (affordable for mass storage)
• A second independent server

Never store backups only on the same server as your website. If the server fails or is compromised, you will lose both the site and the backups.

3. Restoration Testing

A backup you can't restore is worthless. Regularly test that you can restore from your backups. We recommend doing a restoration test at least once a month in a staging or testing environment.

4. Proper Retention

Keep multiple versions of backups so you can roll back to different points in time:

• Last 7 days: daily backups
• Last month: weekly backups
• Last 3 months: monthly backups

Recommended Backup Plugins

UpdraftPlus

The most popular with over 3 million installations. The free version allows scheduled cloud backups. The premium version adds incremental backups, migration, and cloning.

BlogVault

A premium solution that offers real-time incremental backups, integrated staging, and one-click restoration. Ideal for e-commerce sites where every transaction counts.

BackWPup

A robust free alternative that allows scheduling full backups and sending them to multiple storage destinations simultaneously.

How to Restore a Backup

1. Access your WordPress dashboard (or hosting if WordPress is not working)
2. Navigate to the restore section of your backup plugin
3. Select the backup you want to restore
4. Choose what to restore: files, database, or both
5. Start the restoration and wait for it to complete
6. Verify that your site works correctly
7. Clear the site cache

If you prefer not to worry about backups and let professionals handle it, check our support plans that include daily automatic backups with external storage and guaranteed restoration.