Systems
Backups that actually work when you need them
Almost everyone has backups. Rather fewer have backups that restore. The difference is one afternoon.
Every business we audit has backups. A surprising number of those backups cannot be restored, and nobody discovers this until the day it matters.
The rule worth remembering
Three copies of the data, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else entirely. A backup on the same server as the site is not a backup — it is a second copy of the thing that just burned down.
What to back up
- The database. Daily for a shop, weekly for a brochure site.
- Uploaded files. These are frequently forgotten because they are not in version control.
- Configuration — environment files, server config, cron jobs. The part that takes longest to reconstruct from memory.
- Not the whole server image. Restoring one of those is slower than rebuilding from a script.
The test almost nobody runs
Restore a backup to a staging environment and open the site. That is the whole test, it takes an afternoon, and it finds the things that make backups useless: an incomplete database dump, a missing uploads folder, an encrypted archive whose passphrase nobody has, a retention window shorter than the time it takes to notice a problem.
Do it once a year. Put it in the calendar.
Retention matters more than frequency
If a compromise is discovered three weeks after it happened and you keep seven days of backups, every copy you hold is already infected. Keep daily backups for a fortnight, weekly for a couple of months, monthly for a year. Storage is cheap; the alternative is not.
Encryption and access
Backups contain everything, including personal data. Encrypt them at rest, keep the keys somewhere other than the backup, and restrict who can reach them. A backup archive in a shared folder is a data breach waiting for someone to notice.
Write down the restore procedure
One page: where the backups are, how to reach them, the commands to restore, what to check afterwards. The person doing this will be stressed, possibly at night, possibly not the person who set it up. Institutional memory is not a recovery plan.
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