Imagine waking up one day to discover your website is not just down but gone. Then you find out it’s not just your site; it seems to be a catastrophic server failure. As you scramble to figure out what’s wrong, you receive the news you never thought you’d hear: the data center housing your servers has gone up in flames.

This might sound like a doomsday scenario, but it’s far from fiction. On March 10th, 2021, OVH’s data center in Strasbourg, France, went up in flames and obliterated 30,000 servers, causing significant data loss for countless companies. Those without off-site backups were left in utter chaos, realizing too late the importance of an ironclad backup strategy.

The Stark Reality of Data Loss

In our hyper-connected world, data is the heart of any business. Losing data, whether your website, customer records, or vital business files, can spell disaster. The OVH incident was a harsh wake-up call, but it shouldn’t take a calamity to highlight the critical importance of reliable backups.

The web is more powerful and more vulnerable than ever. Bad actors are constantly looking for weaknesses to exploit, data to hijack, and digital assets to hold ransom (Read more in our Ransomware blog post)​​. Relying on a single backup point is a gamble no business can afford.

Off-Site Backups: Your Safety Net

Off-site backups are your insurance policy, ensuring your data is stored away from your primary servers. This separation is crucial because it means that even if your data center is compromised by hardware failure, fire, natural disaster, or cyberattack, your backups are safe and can be quickly accessed to restore normal operations.

The Limitations of Daily Backups

Many web hosts offer daily backups as part of their service, and while that’s better than nothing, it’s not enough for sites with high activity. Daily backups only capture a snapshot of your site once every 24 hours, leaving a potentially dangerous gap where data could be lost if disaster strikes. For businesses that need up-to-the-minute accuracy, daily backups fall short.

Crafting Your Backup Schedule: Finding the Right Rhythm

Your backup frequency should match your site’s traffic and content creation patterns. For a blog or static site, daily backups should be enough. But if you’re running a large e-commerce store with constant transactions, you’ll need something much more robust.

E-commerce sites can be busy hubs of data points, with every hour bringing new orders, updated inventory, and critical customer data. Losing even an hour’s worth of data can lead to lost sales, unhappy customers, and the nightmare of reconciling records. For large online stores, hourly database backups aren’t just a precaution; they’re essential. JetBackup simplifies this by allowing you to schedule hourly backups of the entire site or just the database, ensuring your most recent data is always protected.

The JetBackup Advantage

JetBackup offers a solution for managing both scheduled and on-demand backups. It supports many off-site destinations, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Dropbox, allowing you to choose where your data
lives​.

Ultimately, the ability to quickly restore your site from a recent backup can mean the difference between a minor stumble and a major crisis. Don’t leave your website’s safety to chance. Implement a backup strategy that suits your needs and leverage backups to stay ahead of potential threats​​.