He thought he had backups…

A few months ago a friend of mine called me and I could hear in his voice that he was in trouble:

I’m ****** I thought we had backups running but we didn’t … really.\
– Mister Smith, Web Agency Manager

He was managing a Web Agency in Bordeaux and had everything in place to manage web projects from their creation to their long term maintenance.

Part of the maintenance job is to handle website’s potential crash and be ready to deploy a backup quickly.\
As probably a lot of other agencies and developers he was relying on hosting company systems that are supposed to handle those backups without ever really testing them.

And what had to happen, happened: one server got deleted together with all its backups… that’s it… not turning back.\
They were using a Digital Ocean (which btw we love) server together with the paid option ($4/month) to have daily droplet backups and CloudWays to manage their servers and deployments .\
A simple click on a button got the entire droplet deleted and with it all its backups.

I was surprised to hear that removing a droplet actually deletes all its backups too but that’s what happened.

This is the kind of things that is usually not tested and that’s why having a third party solution dedicated to websites backups on a separated server is a must-have for any professional agencies.

The moral of the story:

• Don’t simply rely on your hosting backups (don’t put all your eggs in the same basket)
• Have an actual recovery process in place with simple instructions (we’re working on a simple “recovery procedure” that’ll be released soon)
• Test your backups on regular base (go through your recovery process and validate each and every step)

If you’re looking for a simple backups solution for web agencies, visit simplebackups.com and try our tool, we have a free plan.