How Often Should You Back Up Your Website? (And the Thing Nobody Backs Up)

Frequency Is a Question About Loss, Not Storage

The right frequency comes from one question: if you had to restore from your most recent backup, how much would you lose? For a brochure site updated monthly, a weekly backup is fine. For a store processing orders continuously, a daily backup means potentially losing a day of orders, customer registrations, and inventory changes — which is usually unacceptable.

Files and Database Are Different Problems

Your site is two things: files (code, themes, images) and a database (products, orders, customers, content). Files change rarely. The database changes constantly. A backup routine that treats them identically usually backs up files too often and the database not often enough — which is exactly the wrong way round for an e-commerce store.

The Thing Nobody Backs Up

Third-party app data. Reviews living in a review app, subscriber lists in an email platform, customer support history in a helpdesk tool — none of this is in your website backup, because it isn't on your server. Stores discover this during migrations and after incidents, when years of accumulated reviews turn out to exist only inside a service they no longer use. Check what data lives outside your site, and whether it's exportable.

• — Database backed up at a frequency matching your order volume
• — Files backed up, less frequently but reliably
• — Backups stored off-server, not only alongside the live site
• — Third-party app data exported periodically
• — At least one restore actually tested, start to finish

Off-Server Storage Is Not Optional

A backup stored on the same server as your live site protects you against a bad deployment and nothing else. Server failure, hosting account compromise, or an account suspension takes the backup with the site. At least one copy needs to live somewhere entirely separate — a different provider, different account, different infrastructure.

The Test Most People Skip

An untested backup is an assumption. Actually restoring one — ideally to a staging environment — is the only way to know whether it works, whether it's complete, and how long recovery takes. Businesses regularly discover during a genuine emergency that their backups have been silently failing for months, or that restoring takes eight hours rather than the thirty minutes they assumed.

How Long to Keep Them

Not every problem is discovered immediately. A corrupted database, a security compromise, or a bad data import can go unnoticed for weeks. Keeping a rolling set — recent daily backups, plus weekly and monthly ones going further back — means you can restore to a point before the problem started rather than to a point after it.

Backup Strategy That Actually Works — With Devrex Digital

Devrex Digital builds and maintains stores with automated off-server backups at a frequency matched to order volume, and with restore procedures tested rather than assumed. If you've never actually restored a backup, you don't yet know whether you have one.