Website Backups: What to Back Up, How Often, and How to Test a Restore

Backups are the least interesting part of running a website and the only part that matters on the worst day. The good news is that getting this right takes an afternoon, once. This guide covers what a complete backup contains, how often to take one, where to keep it, how long to keep it, how to test a restore without touching the live site, what the backups on a hosting plan do and do not cover, and the questions to ask any host about theirs.

The three things a complete backup covers

• The files. Pages, images, themes, plugins, uploads — everything that makes up the site as visitors see it.
• The database. On any content-managed site this holds your actual content: posts, pages, products, orders, settings. Files without the database restore an empty shell.
• Email. Frequently forgotten, because people think of email as separate. If your mail is hosted alongside the site, it needs backing up too.

A backup missing any one of these will not bring your business back on its own.

What each part contains, and what happens without it

The last two rows are not part of a hosting backup, but a migration or a rebuild stalls without them. Keep a copy of your DNS records and a password manager entry for every login alongside the backup plan.

How often is often enough

The honest way to decide is to ask how much work you are willing to lose. That is your backup interval.

• A brochure site that changes monthly. Daily backups are ample; weekly would survive.
• A site with regular posts or products. Daily, without question.
• A shop taking orders. Daily plus a database backup more often, because a lost day of orders is lost revenue and lost customers.

Gotka hosting plans take daily backups as standard, which covers the great majority of business sites.

A backup schedule by type of site

One copy is not a backup strategy

If your only backup lives on the same server as the site, a server-level problem takes both. Keep at least one copy somewhere else — downloaded to a machine you control, or in separate storage. It does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be somewhere else.

A simple rule that covers most businesses: three copies of the data, on two kinds of storage, with one of them off the server. The live site is one copy, the host's daily backup is the second, and a copy you download yourself is the third. The download is the one that saves you if the account itself is lost, suspended or compromised.

How to download your own copy from cPanel

On cPanel hosting, the off-server copy takes a few minutes and no technical knowledge:

1. Log in to cPanel and open the Backup tool (or Backup Wizard).
2. Choose a full account backup for a complete copy, or download the home directory and each database separately if you want smaller files.
3. Wait for the archive to be generated, then download it to your computer.
4. Move it to storage that is not your computer alone: an external drive, or a cloud storage folder.
5. Name the file with the date, and delete copies older than the retention period you chose.

A full account backup includes email, which is why it is the simplest option for most owners. Our guide to cPanel for non-technical owners shows where the tool sits.

How to test a restore, properly

This is the step that separates a real backup from a comforting assumption. You do not need to break the live site to test it.

1. Take the most recent backup and restore it somewhere that is not your live site — a staging area or a temporary location your host can provide.
2. Open it. Do the pages load? Are the images there, or just broken placeholders?
3. Check the newest content you remember adding. If it is missing, your backup is older than you think.
4. Try logging in. An admin login that does not work turns a restore into a much longer afternoon.

Do this once. If it works, you know your process works. If it does not, you have found out on a calm Tuesday rather than during an outage.

A worked example: recovering from a bad plugin update

Here is what the whole process looks like end to end, using the most common real-world incident: a plugin update that breaks the site.

1. 9:14am. An update to a form plugin runs automatically. The site starts showing a white screen instead of the homepage.
2. 9:16am. Instead of guessing which setting changed, you open the hosting control panel and look at last night's backup — taken at 2:00am, well before the update ran.
3. 9:20am. You restore just the files (not the database, since no content changed since 2:00am) to roll the plugin code back to its previous version. The site loads again.
4. 9:25am. You check the admin area, confirm this morning's one new enquiry form submission is still present in the database, and disable automatic updates for that plugin pending a manual check.

Eleven minutes, start to finish, because a same-day backup existed and nobody had to work out what changed by trial and error. Without it, the same incident usually means hours spent comparing files with an old local copy, or rebuilding settings from memory.

How long to keep them

Keeping only yesterday's backup protects you against a server failure but not against a problem you did not notice immediately — a bad edit, a broken plugin update, or a defacement discovered a week later. A rolling set of daily backups going back at least a couple of weeks is far more useful than a single most-recent copy.

For a store, the retention question has a second half: an order placed after the backup you restore is gone unless you capture it another way. Export orders from the payment gateway or marketplace regularly, so a restore from last night can be reconciled against today's transactions.

When to take an extra backup by hand

Daily backups cover the ordinary day. A handful of moments are worth an extra manual backup first, taken minutes before the change rather than relying on last night's copy:

• Updating a theme or plugin that you have not updated before, or that is central to how the site works.
• Publishing a redesign or new section that touches templates across the whole site.
• Migrating to a new host or server. You want a known-good copy from the exact moment before the move.
• Editing the database directly, or running a bulk import of products, users or content.
• Letting a new team member or agency into the admin area for the first time.

It takes a few minutes and it turns "we have a problem" into "we will put the version from ten minutes ago back".

What a hosting backup does and does not protect against

Questions to ask any host about their backups

• How often are backups taken, and at what time of day?
• How far back can I restore: a day, a week, a month?
• What is included: files, database, email, all three?
• Where are they stored: on the same server, or separately?
• How do I restore: myself from the control panel, or by ticket, and how long does that take?
• Can I download a copy myself, and is there a charge?

A host that answers all six clearly is one you can plan around. Vague answers mean the backup exists on a slide, not on a disk.

Common mistakes

• Backing up files and forgetting the database. The most common gap, and the one that restores an empty site.
• Assuming email is somewhere else. If it is on the hosting account, it is in or out of the backup with everything else.
• One copy, on the server. Fine for a bad edit, useless for a lost account.
• Keeping only the latest copy. A problem found a week late cannot be undone.
• Never restoring once to test. The step that turns a hope into a plan.
• Restoring a hacked site without closing the hole. The clean copy is reinfected within days.
• Relying on a plugin that backs up to the same disk. It fills the server and protects nothing.
• No record of logins and licence keys. A restore you cannot log in to is only half a restore.

Where Gotka Technologies fits

Gotka cloud hosting includes daily backups on every plan, from RM17.80/month on LiteSpeed servers with cPanel, free SSL and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Because backups are managed at the hosting level, there is nothing for you to install or schedule, and the cPanel backup tool is there for the off-server copy whenever you want one.

If you are unsure what your current host actually backs up, or when it last worked, our team can look at it with you. Migration to Gotka is free. If keeping the site updated and backed up is something you would rather hand over entirely, a website care plan from RM150/month includes the ongoing maintenance.

Key terms used in this guide

• Full account backup: a single archive of everything on a hosting account: files, databases, email and settings.
• Database: where a content-managed site stores its posts, pages, products, orders and settings; separate from the files.
• Retention: how far back a set of backups goes before the oldest is discarded.
• Rolling backups: a set where each new backup replaces the oldest, keeping a fixed number of days available.
• Off-server copy: a backup stored somewhere other than the server the site runs on.
• Staging site: a private copy of the site used to test changes or restores without affecting visitors.
• Restore: putting a backup back in place, either over the live site or into a staging location.
• cPanel: the control panel on most shared hosting, including the backup and restore tools.