Description: Explains the importance of website backups, why they are needed, and a brief description of the different types.
What are Website Backups?
As with anything digital, websites can be prime places for cybercriminals to target. With so many businesses using websites to sell their product, get in touch with their clients, and store private information, the risk of being targeted by an online threat increases. And even if none of the mentioned functions apply to your website, website backups are still highly recommended. All they are is simply a copy of all the data on your website. For example, in WordPress, when you backup your site, you can save those backups to a file, so that they are readily available to reload should your site not be functioning right. A good rule of thumb is to save a backup of your site frequently, whether that’s after every alteration you make or after a set period of time is up to you, but backups are really helpful when you keep them up to date. Otherwise, you’re back to square one anyway.
Why are Website Backups needed?
No matter how small or large your website is, you should always save a backup of it. By keeping a recently saved, functioning version of the website, the problem you experience can be rectified. A common problem for developers is that they start branching out and adding all different types of new plugins and code to their website that, once they run it again, doesn’t warp seamlessly with the rest of their code, making their website malfunction and stop working properly. Without a backup, they’ll have to go back through and delete each of those added features, taking up time which takes up money the longer the site is down. With a backup, all they have to do is load it and-voila!-their site is back to normal and in functioning condition.
Is it really that necessary?
Short answer? Yes. Now, sure, you could argue that in the previous example, it wasn’t really necessary to save a backup since they could have gone back into their code and undone everything, and, yes, that’s true. But what about in an instance where you might misclick and accidentally delete the files to your website? Some mistakes like that are permanent, which means the only solution without a backup is recreating the entire website. You could be redoing 10 pages of work or over 50. That certainly wouldn’t be fun. Having a backup would save you that unneeded stress.
Types of Website Backups
There are three main types of website backups: Full backup, differential backup, and incremental backup.
Full Backup
Full backups are the simplest backups to understand and are something you’ve probably seen or heard of before. To put it simply, full backups save all your website’s data every day. So, all files, objects, bytes however you wish to measure your data – every one of them is copied over to a secondary storage target each time. In Parablu, they give you a three-day example, and after every day, when the website is reloaded, all the changes made from the previous day are saved and reloaded along with the original content. Over the days they add a whole new file to their original content, and with this backup type, this new file along with the original files will all be resaved to be loaded later.
Differential Backup
Differential backups, unlike full backups, don’t take nearly as much time to load. Differential backup makes a copy of files that have changed since the full backup. So, referring back to the example mentioned in full backups, this website backup type would only save the new file and leave all the other files alone. There were no changes made to them so there was no need to resave them. This type is much more useful for larger websites since it helps cut down that save time to a much smaller chunk. However, there is a downside. If you wish to get back the latest copy of data, it’ll take us 80 mins (time taken from the Parablu example) to restore – that 40 + 20 + 20. So in that aspect, it’s not great.
Incremental Backup
As stated perfectly by Parablu, “Enter the next innovation – incremental backup. Incremental backup only backup what was changed since the last backup.” So, unlike the differential backup that resaved every change since the last full backup, incremental backups only save what changed from the last backup in general, whether it was a full backup or a differential one. Sadly, however, this backup type still doesn’t save you from a long retore time. You still have to restore every save on top of the full backup, so, while you have been able to improve backup speeds progressively, you have traded off restore times in each of the above cases.
Key Takeaways
- Website backups are saved copies of all the code, files, and plugins of your website
- Website backups are needed for quick restorations should something go wrong with the website
- Website backups are recommended for any size website
- There are three types of website backups: Full, Differential, and Incremental