There are still huge numbers of people using backup plugins that have no capability for off-site storage. That is, they just create a backup of your website… and store it on your website.
That’s really dangerous.
Such backups give you no protection against any of these events:
- Your web hosting company goes bankrupt.
- Your web site is hacked by a malicious hacker (perhaps hired by a rival or other enemy) whose aim is to destroy you.
- Your web site is hacked by a mass-hack that also includes code to tweak backups (so that when you discover that your site had a cunning back-door placed in it, and restore from a backup, another back door is there). This is quite a feasible scenario, if we’re talking about backup plugins with thousands of users – it’s worth the hacker’s time (and it’s not much effort to put a few modifications in a zip file).
- Your web hosting company’s billing systems get confused, or your invoices get lost or filed as spam, and your account gets shut down for non-payment.
- Your web site goes over its storage quota, and your web hosting company helpfully, or perhaps automatically, decides to delete the biggest files on your storage – which are likely to be your backups.
- You didn’t realise that the small-print of your “unlimited” web hosting forbade you to store backups on your storage (it is standard for “unlimited” suppliers to do this) – and your web hosting company, perhaps automatically, deletes them when it spots them.
- Your website happens to be on the same shared server as a dodgy site that causes the web hosting company’s server to get seized by the authorities – with everything on it.
- Your website is on a server with lose security, and it gets broken into through another method (e.g. someone else’s website), and all the data on it gets deleted.
- You simply forgot to download a copy of your backups after making an important change or set of changes, and you have to do them all over again.
I’m sure you can think of others.
That backups should be “off-site” is one of the top rules of backups. Backups that are on-site are not really backups; they’re just copies.
UpdraftPlus supports backups to Dropbox, Amazon S3 (and any compatible supplier – of which there are many), Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud Files, FTP, and (in UpdraftPlus Premium), WebDAV, SFTP and encrypted FTP. It even lets you send them via email (only recommended if you’re sure they’re small enough to not get rejected by your mail servers). There’s no need to take risks with your backups. Backups which are not off-site may lose you everything – don’t risk it!
Get UpdraftPlus Premium today from our shop, with support and updates. Sleep better afterwards!
David Anderson (Founder, UpdraftPlus)
