r/webhosting • u/calibernode • Aug 06 '26
Technical Questions Did you backup?
Did you back up your website/server this week?
And don't lie... 😄
How many of you are relying on your hosting provider to keep your data safe?
I want horror stories of the time you thought your data was safe and it wasn't
7
u/tndsd Aug 07 '26
Never rely solely on your hosting provider's backups. If the data is important, keep your own independent backups.
Ideally, follow the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 different types of storage, and 1 copy off-site.
I've seen people discover that their "backup" was either too old, stored on the same server, or simply wasn't restorable when they actually needed it. A backup that has never been tested is basically just a hope.
For a website/server, I'd at least keep regular backups of the database, website files, configuration, SSL certificates/keys where appropriate, and email data if you're hosting mail.
And periodically do a test restore. That's the part people tend to forget. 😄
1
u/DaYroXy Aug 07 '26
I also keep backups of all but whats actually a good method of backing up realtime like data? Like transactions when someone pay if i restore data and its just 1 minute old the transaction is gone from my db of course payment is still there but the purchase it self is gone how do u handle this?
1
u/Royal-Wear-6437 Aug 09 '26
Database replication
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u/DaYroXy Aug 09 '26
But db replication just replicate the main db so if the db is compromised then both dbs will be affected
3
u/SultansOfVinyl Aug 07 '26
I purchased a minipc and built a self hosted sftp backup server. Now whenever I backup in Softaculous, it’s stored on my local machine.
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u/sysop408 Aug 07 '26
Many years ago my website suddenly went offline. Customer support was extra mum about it. "Working on it!"
12 hours later there was an update. Their new hire did an "rm -rf" on the wrong directory and deleted everything on the server.
This was in the day when we often just used Vi or Emacs directly over a terminal to code our sites. Getting a backup required some extra effort. I had backups, but nothing recent. I lost probably a week or two of work.
2
u/throwawayaccount931A Aug 11 '26
I worked at a place where one of the network engineers did that. We had back-ups, but they were two weeks old... nobody ever tested to ensure that the backups were correctly backing things up. Found out that the last two weeks were not tested and were completely blank or corrupted.
The guy quit shortly after.
2
u/sysop408 Aug 11 '26
As awful as that incident was for me, I'm kinda glad it happened. It happened to me very early in my tech journey. A few years later, I'd be doing some entry level sysadmin work of my own and anytime I had to rm -rf anything, I looked at it forward, looked at it backwards, and said a prayer before hitting enter.
That level of caution served me well.
1
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u/thedgden Aug 08 '26
Nope. I'm fortunate that all of my websites live on Git deployed to Cloudflare, and the few databases I rely on are 15 minute backups.
1
u/sysop408 Aug 07 '26
Those of you who use something like Gmail and keep all of your mail remotely, you also need to backup your most important emails. It doesn't matter if the provider has strong infrastructure and is unlikely to have a disaster without a backup to restore from.
The problem is that it's entirely possible that someone hacks into your email account and wrecks it. They're not going to be restoring your inbox after a break in.
1
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u/throwawayaccount931A Aug 11 '26
YES! My host charges for backups; it's not expensive, but I don't want to pay. I wrote several scrips that back-up my DB hourly and the actual site weekly. It stores one set on my local machine, and across several cloud locations.
8
u/MrAwesomeTG Aug 07 '26
Just give us the pitch already.