Thread: Do all hosts provide daily backups?

As I can see, there is the abundance of web hosting providers claiming they provide daily backups.

How it can be checked?

Well all the web hosts do things differently. I guess web hosts take backups according to web hosting types.

I don't think it can be checked since they will just tell you to get a backup from cpanel.
I doubt most of them do it, just like none of them actually give you unlimited hosting.

You should always back up your files yourself, don't rely on the hosting company to do that. Even if they claim to back up daily, they may have limits on how much they back up. So if your website exceeds a certain number of megabytes, they may turn off the auto backup and not notify you. Also, some companies may charge you to restore files. If you have your own backups you have complete control.

If you intend to check if the company actually maintains a daily backup of your website, you may ask them to provide the file sometime when they least expect it. Thats the only way imo.

You may even think of signing up for backup plan if the host does offer such a service. This would enable you to schedule the backups based on your preference. Moreover, if can have incremental backups which can help you with saving on the disk space. R1Soft CDP is one of the most reliable tools for taking backups. You might want to get in touch to know more about it.

Not all hosts do daily backups. Only the good ones do. I am lucky enough to have daily backups done for me but I had a colleague you lost all of her data in a crash before. Her host did not have a backup system in place which was horrendous.

If your host doesn't have a backup system like mine, I'd recommend doing it manually in cPanel or FTP.

Originally Posted by simplyamazing12

If your host doesn't have a backup system like mine, I'd recommend doing it manually in cPanel or FTP.

Even if your host does offer backups, I'd still be making my own regardless.

Originally Posted by benjaminp

Even if your host does offer backups, I'd still be making my own regardless.

I used to do it either way but it was taking up so much space on my external hard drive. I erased my server by accident and my provider had a back up for me which is quite cool. I got my site back within half an hour.

No point in taking up all of my external hard drive space (200GB+ worth of material)

Never rely on your host -- I have been hosting for years and seen big and small companies lose data. Hacks happen, disgruntled employees, fires, ANYTHING! If you make your living from your site you want 4 backups, 1 gives you about 99% safety, 2 is about 99.9 -- and I have (rarely) seen 3 bad backups! Let your host keep one if they do -- and check the TOS because if they keep a backup and promise it, it puts them liable for possible damages! Second one send to Amazon data services or another hosting site on a different host. 3rd in you safe deposit box!

Daily backup is very important and while choosing a company one has to find out if the host provides that!

As many others have said, do not rely on your host for this. When popular host Acronoc suddenly locked their doors and
disappeared, anyone relying on them for their backups was more or less out of business. When the fire at ThePlanet
took out 26,000 servers, the back up servers were right there with the main servers and just as melted. You need third
party OFF SITE back ups, something like Clonebox for example.

You also need back ups from multiple points in time, and many hosts who say they provide back ups don't do that.
Let me explain why this is important. Let's say the backup is done every night at midnight. What if your site gets
hacked at 11:30 PM? By the time you know about it, the next morning, the back up is worthless because it's just
another copy of hacked garbage. You need a back up from last night, but also from the night before. Ideally also
one from the week before and one from the month before, because sometimes problems such as hack scripts aren't
caught immediately. So proper back ups are off site, and they rotate, always having backups available from different
points in time.

Another problem with many hosting company back ups is that some still use magnetic tape, a 1947 technology.
That was OK in 1947, when they were backing up several kilobytes. Today, when you may have many GBs, restoring
that back up may take several days. A proper back up to prevent disaster is immediately available along with
off site and rotated.

Downloading back ups from CPanel suffers from the same problem - it's not immediately available if you have to
upload many GBs a server via your cable modem Remember you upload speed might be only 1/10th of your download
speed, so you'd wait many hours while it uploads, then when it times out you get to start over again. More importantly,
CPanel back ups aren't automatic, which means they won't happen daily. You'll do them fairly often in the beginning,
but one day down the road when you need it you'll realize you haven't taken a back up for three months. You just lost
your last three months of data and work. So a proper back up for a web server is also automatic.

Automatic, off site, rotated, and immediately available. Those are the keys to a proper back up and hosting company
backups frequently are none of those things. Instead if your site is your business, you want something like Clonebox.

many offer this feature, but I doubt even a half of that quantity is really providing it.

Every web host has a different backup policy, and accordingly they take backups of your data. Some hosts may take a daily backup however, it is for their own cause not for you.

Originally Posted by simplyamazing12

Not all hosts do daily backups. Only the good ones do. I am lucky enough to have daily backups done for me but I had a colleague you lost all of her data in a crash before. Her host did not have a backup system in place which was horrendous.

If your host doesn't have a backup system like mine, I'd recommend doing it manually in cPanel or FTP.

Doing it manually is ok if your site is a hobby. If your sure is your business, your backups need to be automatic so they'll be fresh. They also need to be immediately available in a datacenter. Spending four days uploading while your site is down is unacceptable for a business. Compare re-uploading everything for for days versus clicking the "make live" button in Clonebox and having the site live again in five minutes.

The rules of backup are that server backups must be:
Automatic (so it's done daily)
Tested
Readibly available to a datacenter
Offsite from the main server
Rotated (to avoid merely having two hacked or broken copies)

For my own personal reference, I also back up monthly via FTP to an external hard drive that I keep in the safe at my business offices. Piece of mind and double protection against any data loss is amazing.

Originally Posted by simplyamazing12

For my own personal reference, I also back up monthly via FTP to an external hard drive that I keep in the safe at my business offices. Piece of mind and double protection against any data loss is amazing.

Keep in mind that if a sites is script driven, an FTP based backup will be missing file ownership, permission, xattr, and most importantly DATABASES, so it's not a complete backup. Of course it would also be missing email and other settings.

It won't back up the databases but at least you will have most of the infrastructure backed up.
That is why you should go with hosts who do a COMPLETE back up.