As a support person, there's calls and messages you really dread getting. Like "Hey, my website went down. Can you get it back up?" Over the years I've had a few of those of course, I'm a support person, it's my job. I want to share one of those times and the lessons I learned from it.
A few years ago, I was working with a client who had a website, a hosting provider and a backup process that they followed religiously. There was a button in their Content Management System (CMS) that said "backup" and they'd been told all they needed to do was hit that button and everything would be backed up, the backup file emailed to them and they'd save it to their computer. They did this regularly, exactly as they were shown to do and nothing seemed amiss. It sounds great, right? Simple? Follow the process and you'll be good.
One morning, I got the message "Charly, our site is down. What's happening?!" It turns out, the hosting provider had simply disappeared and weren't answering the phones or their emails. Of course, when the hosting disappears, the website stops being displayed, emails stop and my clients business pretty much ground to a standstill.
Our only option was to find new hosting, set that up and restore the backup my client had been saving. the latest backup was from the night before - no problem right?
As Murphy is alive and well, that answer turned out to be "no". I looked at the file I'd been sent and had what YouTuber Tom Scott calls an OhNoSecond. That's the second you realize that something is irrecoverably wrong and all you can say is 'oh no.' The backup that my client had been so diligently keeping for years, the one button solution she'd been given, was a database only backup. All her text was there, but nothing else. And I do mean nothing. All the physical files, all the images, all the files that ran the Content Management System? Nope. The backup didn't have any of that.
Very carefully, I asked "Is the only file you have for the backup?" Her answer was emphatic "Yes, that's what we got told we needed."
My heart fell and I felt sick to the stomach. That meant that every image they'd ever uploaded, every video and every audio file was gone because none of it had been captured in that backup. My client had kept copies of some of the files but they were scattered through various folders on her computer and we really had no way of knowing what went where. That meant we had to completely rebuild that website, going through it page by page, finding big black spots where images should have been and try to track down replacements for nearly every single one.
Let me be really clear, my client wasn't careless and certainly wasn't doing anything wrong. She was following the process exactly as it had been explained to her but nobody had ever told her what that backup button was actually capturing and what it wasn't. She'd never tested a restore because there had never been a reason to. Why would you test something you've been told is working?
We all having learning moments or experiences in our lives. This was a huge one for me and it's an experience I return to a lot because it changed the questions I ask.
"Do you have a backup?" is not enough.
Do you know what's in it?
Do you know where it's stored?
Have you ever tested restoring from it?
If you've never sat down and thought about what data your business actually has, how important it is, what happens if you lose it and where it's all stored, it's worth doing that now or if not now, very soon. It's not exciting work but it's the kind of thing that's mostly painless to sort out now and genuinely painful later on.
"Do you just sort of hope and pray that you never, ever, ever have to worry about it?"
Rise and Shine: Your Business Tech Boost Episode 347 - Secure Your Business with Regular Data Backups
I encourage you to take a moment now and answer those questions:
Do you have a backup?
Do you know what's in it?
Do you know where it's stored?
Have you ever tested restoring from it?
If the answer is 'no' to any of those, you immediately have something to action.
Share your thoughts below.
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