Tuesday, half past eight. A garage owner opens his website to check the opening hours he changed on Sunday. The page is blank apart from a line of grey text. An update ran overnight and something broke. He rings his hosting provider and gets a reassuring answer: "Don't worry, we take daily backups."
By the afternoon the site is back. But the three new service pages written a fortnight ago are gone, and so are the enquiries that came through the contact form that week. The only copy they could actually restore was eight days old.
Nobody here was careless. The backups existed. They had simply never been tried.
"We take backups" is really four promises
When a provider says they back up your site, they are making four separate claims. Something gets copied. The copy is kept for a while. It is kept somewhere other than the server it came from. And a human being can put it back, within a length of time you can live with.
The fourth one is the only one that matters on a Tuesday morning, and it is precisely the one nobody tests.
Four questions you can email today
What is copied? Files only, or the database too? A site built on a content system keeps your text, your pages and your form entries in that database. Files alone leave you with an empty shell.
How far back can I go? Last night only, or seven days, or thirty? If a mistake goes unnoticed for a week, a 24-hour window is worth nothing.
Who presses the button, and how long does it take? Can you do it yourself in the control panel, or do you raise a ticket and wait? Ask for a number of hours, not for "quickly".
Can I keep my own copy? A monthly export that you download onto your own drive or cloud storage means you are never dependent on one company's goodwill.
Put the answers in an email to yourself. That email is now your recovery plan, which is more than most small businesses have.
Run the drill once, on a copy
The only way to know a backup works is to put it back. You do not have to risk the live site to find out. Decent hosting lets you create a staging site: a private copy of your website at a hidden address that nobody else sees.
Restore last night's backup into that copy and time it on your phone. Then click through the five things that earn you money: the contact form, the booking or ordering step, the tap-to-call phone link, the price list, the opening hours. Are they all back? Does the form actually send?
Write the steps down on one page while they are fresh. Half an hour on a quiet Tuesday buys you a calm morning on the day it breaks.
What a website backup never includes
Your website is only one of the things that can stop. The domain name sits with a registrar and points at your server through DNS settings, and those settings are in no site backup. Your mailboxes are often with yet another provider. Your booking or till system is usually a supplier's service with its own export that you have to switch on yourself. Your invoices live in the accounting software. Your photos live on somebody's phone.
Then there is the knowledge itself: one person who knows where everything is, and who is on holiday next month.
A domain name that quietly expires takes your website and your email with it.
So make one sheet listing who registered the domain, when it renews, which card pays for it, where the mail runs and where the site runs. In our experience that sheet is worth more than any backup schedule, because it answers the questions you ask at the worst possible moment.
What to do this week
- Email the four questions to your hosting provider and keep the reply.
- Restore one backup onto a staging copy and time how long it takes.
- Write the one sheet: domain, DNS, mail, hosting, who pays, which dates.
If you are not sure which piece sits with which supplier, ITSysPro untangles that sort of dull but useful thing for small businesses fairly often — happy to think it through with you, no obligation.