Restoring a Backup Before You Need To

A backup nobody has opened

Ask a small business owner whether the website is backed up and the answer is usually yes. The host takes one every night, or a plugin sends one somewhere every week.

Ask when one was last restored and the usual answer is a pause, then never.

Until a backup has been restored, it is a file that probably contains your site. Nobody knows what is missing from it, how old it really is, or how long getting it back would take.

World Backup Day falls on Sunday, March 31. A better use of it than buying another backup service is finding out whether the one you have works.

What a backup can quietly leave out

• The database, where the pages, orders and form entries actually live.
• The uploads folder, excluded years ago to keep the file small.
• Recent weeks, because the schedule stopped and nobody was told.
• Email, which often sits with a different provider entirely.
• A safe location, when every copy is stored on the same server.
• The means to open it, held by a developer who has moved on.

The second catches more sites than any other. Photographs make up most of a site's size, so a backup trimmed to fit a storage limit tends to keep the text and quietly drop every image.

Why the success email proves little

Most backup tools send a message when they finish, saying the backup completed.

Completed means the job ran to the end. It does not mean the archive opens, that the database inside it is whole, or that the folders it skipped were ones you could live without.

A backup stored on the same server as the site is a particular trap. It survives a bad update, but not a failed server, a closed hosting account, or a hack that reaches every file.

The only test that answers all of this is a restore.

The test, once a quarter

Take last night's backup, the one you would actually rely on, and restore it to a separate, private copy of the site that only you can reach.

Do not make a fresh backup for the occasion. The point is to test what the routine produces on an ordinary night, not what a careful person produces on a good day.

The copy should be password protected, so neither search engines nor customers stumble on it, and it should never touch the live site.

Once a quarter is often enough to catch a schedule that has stopped, and rare enough that people keep doing it. The end of March, June, September and December is easy to remember.

What to check on the restored copy

Open the home page, the main service pages and something deep in the site, such as an old blog post, and check that each has its text and layout.

Look at the images, especially the newest ones. Missing photographs show up as empty boxes or broken icons, and they are the most common gap.

Send a test through each form, and make sure the copy cannot email real customers. A restored shop can send order notices to people who ordered a year ago.

Log in to the dashboard, and check the date of the newest page, post or order. That date tells you exactly how much you would lose.

A worked example

A custom furniture maker in a light industrial unit has a site with several hundred project photographs, added over five years, which do most of its selling.

A backup plugin had been set up in 2015 to send a weekly archive to a cloud storage account. The emails said completed, every week, for three years.

When an archive was restored to a test copy for the first time, the pages came back and the photographs did not. The uploads folder had been excluded in 2016, when the archive outgrew the free storage plan.

Nothing had ever told anyone. The site had been one server failure away from losing the only part of it that sold anything.

The fix took an afternoon: the uploads folder went back into the backup, the storage plan was upgraded, and the host's nightly backup was confirmed as a second copy. The next restore came back complete.

The clock is part of the result

Write down how long the restore took, from the decision to start to a working copy.

That figure includes finding the login for the backup storage, downloading the archive, loading it onto a server, importing the database and fixing whatever does not work first time.

On a WordPress site, one of those fixes is predictable. The site's address is stored in its database, so a copy restored somewhere else keeps pointing at the old address until whoever restores it changes that carefully.

If the test took four hours on a quiet Tuesday, a real restore will take longer, under pressure, with the phone ringing. Better to know the number now.

A note for the next person

The test should end with a page of notes, kept somewhere other than the website: where the backups are stored, how to reach them, which steps the restore needed, and what went wrong.

The next test starts from that page, and so does a real emergency.

For most businesses, the restore is a job for whoever maintains the site. The owner's part is asking for the note each quarter and keeping a copy, so it stays with the business if the supplier changes.

The counter-case

The full routine every quarter is more than some sites need.

A small site that rarely changes, with no shop, bookings or stored form entries, can reasonably be tested twice a year, since there is less to lose between tests.

A host that keeps several weeks of backups away from the server reduces the risk, though it does not remove the need to see one restored.

And a site taking orders every hour may need more than a nightly backup, which is a conversation with whoever runs it rather than a reason to skip the test.

Whatever the schedule, a backup only counts once somebody has restored it and looked.

Before the end of March

1. Find out where your backups are stored.
2. Confirm one copy lives away from the server.
3. Restore last night's backup to a private copy.
4. Check the images, forms and logins.
5. Note the newest date the copy contains.
6. Write down how long it all took.
7. Book the next test for the end of June.

Step three is the whole test. Everything else on the list is preparation or record-keeping, and restoring the backup you would actually rely on is the only step that proves anything.

What happens when nobody checks is covered in twelve years of uploads lost in a server move.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.