Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce options for building online shops. It powers millions of websites all over the world. However, many website owners are failing to adequately protect their websites by implementing a backup system.
Would your business survive if your website suddenly disappeared one day? It’s rare, but it can happen. Backups are your insurance. In case of emergency, they are your lifeline. Don’t risk losing your website after everything you have invested in it.
Top Three Reasons to Backup Magento Websites
- If anything ever goes wrong on your website, you can restore a backup rather than having to start building the website again from scratch.
- Keeping copies of sales data and customer records is essential in case of data loss or corruption.
- Backups limit the potential damage that could happen if your website gets hacked, or if information (products, sales data, images, etc.) are accidentally deleted.
How often should you backup your Magento website?
This depends slightly on the size of your website and how busy it is. If you have a handful of products and several sales a week, backing up once per week should be fine. However, if you get multiple sales on a daily basis or regularly add/edit products then daily backups should be considered.
What should be included in your Magento backups?
It’s imperative that you backup both your actual website files and the database that powers the website. The files are the backbone of the website; they are what makes it work and styles it to your brand. The database contains all of the information about your products, sales and customers.
Make sure you can relate each particular backup of site files with the corresponding database export – if you ever need to restore a backup, you’ll need the matching versions of each in order to avoid errors.
Where should you store your Magento backups?
Backups can be stored on your local computer but there are risks to this: you’ll lose the backups if your computer gets damaged, the hard-drive gets corrupted or if it gets stolen. A more secure way to store backups is by using cloud storage systems such as Dropbox, Amazon S3 or Google Drive.
Cloud-based systems allow you to access the backups from any computer with an internet connection and also keep a hard-copy on your local computer.
Other alternatives of backup storage include saving separate copies on external hard-drives or memory sticks.
What’s better – automatic or manual backups?
Setting up an automatic backup system means that you don’t have to remember to take backups – it’s all done in the background without requiring your input. Automated backups can be scheduled as regularly as you need them and can be set to take place at quieter times on your website (e.g. 2am) so that your performance isn’t affected whilst it’s taking place.
There are still some cases where manual backups are recommended. If, for instance, your website developer is rolling out some new features on the website, you should ensure that a manual backup is taken immediately before they release the new code. This means that, if anything goes wrong, the site can be rolled back to how it was before the new features were deployed.