After a website is finally up and running, it’s easy to sit back and feel that you are finally finished: the site will take care of itself. But, like other assets, such as a car or a building, websites need a lot of maintenance. And, when you don’t do that maintenance, you pay in the end. One maintenance task is to backup your website. This article from Word Fence says it best, “If you only have one backup, you have no backups.”
Why Do You Need More than One Backup?
There have been many incidents in my work that showed the need for multiple backups.
- In one unusual situation, a client asked me to restore her site to a design she had from two years previous. Because the old site was HTML and CSS only, there was no risk in doing such a restore. Sites are generally more complicated now. It would be unwise to roll back 6 months or a year because the outdated software that would have run the site is a security risk.
- A hacked client website situation where we had to go through several months of backups to find a copy that didn’t have compromised code. In this case, they had not responded to my emails that they needed to update their software 6 months earlier. A very sharp server tech had saved the day with a series of full server backups.
“In the context of cybersecurity, the adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is a massive understatement. Make no mistake, the easiest way to handle a security incident is to prevent it from ever happening in the first place. We continually remind our readers about security best practices because the time spent implementing them is nominal compared to the time that would be spent responding in the aftermath of a successful attack.”