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Website Backups & Disaster Recovery — RPO/RTO, Offsite Copies, and Restore Drills (2025 Guide)

Protect your website against mistakes, malware, or outages with a resilient backup strategy. Define Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective, automate snapshots, and practice safe restores before you actually need them.

Backups only matter if you can restore them quickly. This guide shows how to design a simple, reliable plan — from backup frequency and retention to encryption and real‑world recovery drills.

Table of Contents

  1. Key definitions: RPO & RTO
  2. 3‑2‑1 backup strategy
  3. Automation & scheduling
  4. Retention & compliance
  5. Point‑in‑Time Restore (PITR)
  6. Encryption & integrity checks
  7. Restore drills (no downtime)
  8. FAQs

1) Key definitions: RPO & RTO

TermWhat it meansExample target
RPOHow much data loss you can tolerate15 minutes for active stores; 24 hours for blogs
RTOHow quickly you must recoverUnder 30 minutes for checkout; 2 hours for content sites

2) 3‑2‑1 backup strategy

  • 3 copies: production + two backups
  • 2 different media: local snapshot + remote object storage
  • 1 offsite: different provider/region to survive outages
Avoid keeping all copies on the same server. A single failure or ransomware event can remove everything.

3) Automation & scheduling

  • Nightly incremental file backups + weekly full archives
  • Database dumps every 4–6 hours for busy sites
  • Bandwidth‑friendly sync to offsite storage with versioning

4) Retention & compliance

  • Keep 30–90 days of history; longer if regulations require
  • Tag long‑term archives (monthly/quarterly) for audits
  • Document policies and review them every quarter

5) Point‑in‑Time Restore (PITR)

  • Use write‑ahead logs or binlogs for granular recovery
  • Store logs off‑server; rotate securely
  • Test a PITR once a month on a staging clone

6) Encryption & integrity checks

  • Encrypt archives at rest and in transit (e.g., AES‑256 + TLS)
  • Sign backups and verify with checksums
  • Restrict access with dedicated credentials and MFA

7) Restore drills (no downtime)

  1. Spin up a staging subdomain
  2. Restore the latest full + incremental set
  3. Run automated tests and manual smoke checks
  4. Record timing vs your RTO target and fix gaps
Be disaster‑ready
Adopt automated backups, offsite copies, and regular restore exercises.

8) FAQs

What’s better: snapshot or file‑level backup?

Use both. Snapshots are fast for full restores; file‑level archives help when you only need specific folders.

How often should I back up databases?

Match your RPO. Busy sites may need 15‑minute binlog shipping; less active sites can do hourly or 4‑hour intervals.

Where should I store offsite copies?

Use a different provider/region with versioning enabled and lifecycle policies for cost control.