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Backups

Automatic Backups

Having a backup of your website is important for many reasons, including:

Many low-end web hosts do not perform backups, and of those that do, most create backups only for their own purposes. They often do not provide you a means to restore, and many times they only keep 1 version of the backup.  It’s important to have daily backups for at least 30 days (preferably longer), so that if a problem is located, you can restore back to a version that predates the issue – which could be several days, weeks, or even months old.

Even if your web host keeps 30+ days of backups that you can use, having an external source for backups is important. Sometimes, a problem can effect the hosting provider that can cause them to lose their backups – especially since many low-end hosting providers don’t replicate their backups or utilize multiple data centers.

With a Sentree Hosting plan, we perform an automated backup every day and keep a full 90 days of backups. Even for our web hosting clients, we use a 3rd party backup solution that is completely separate from our infrastructure, and allows for easy migrations to a new host when desired.

On Demand Backups

We automatically backup your website every day, but sometimes you need an additional backup at a specific point in time – such as before a large website update.  You may make an emergency request, and we will perform an on-demand backup for you right away. Additionally, if you would like the ability to make your own on-demand backups, we are happy to provide you access.

Restoring Backups

The key to a backup is the ability to restore when needed.  When you need a backup restored, you may make an emergency request, which we will handle as a top priority.  There are many things to consider when handling and restoring backups, and we provide our expertise and advice, taking care of the steps necessary to reduce downtime, avoid data loss (a common side-effect of restoring a backup) and ensure a smooth process.

Our restore process always includes backing up the site we’re about to restore over and then performing the restore.  This way we can also revert back to the version right before the restore, in case it’s discovered that important data was written over. We can also restore a backup to a temporary environment, allowing us to incrementally restore individual components of the backup to your live environment – avoiding any data loss or downtime.

As with on-demand backups, we can also give you access to an easy-to-use tool that lets you restore on demand. However, most of our clients opt to have us perform restores, due to the potential risks or data loss, downtime, or other issues.