Backups are business insurance. A disk failure, a buggy plugin update, an accidental DROP TABLE or a breach can bring your site down. A solid backup plan lets you roll back to a working state in minutes or hours instead of suffering prolonged downtime. The key to \u201cpainless\u201d backups is a simple, automated strategy tied to clear RPO\/RTO targets, regular restore tests and clear ownership. This article provides a practical Unihost checklist from the 3\u20112\u20111 strategy to scheduling, encryption and health monitoring.<\/p>\n
What exactly to back up<\/strong><\/p>\n RPO and RTO in plain English<\/strong><\/p>\n RPO (Recovery Point Objective) \u2014 how much data you can afford to lose, e.g., 30 minutes.<\/p>\n RTO (Recovery Time Objective) \u2014 how fast you must recover, e.g., 1 hour. Your backup strategy must meet these targets via snapshot frequency, DB logs, deployment scripts and DNS\/load\u2011balancer switchover procedures.<\/p>\n The 3\u20112\u20111 (and 3\u20112\u20111\u20111\u20110) rule<\/strong><\/p>\n Keep 3 copies, on 2 different media, with 1 copy off\u2011site. Extend with 1 immutable copy and a goal of 0 errors during periodic restore drills.<\/p>\n Backup types<\/strong><\/p>\n Where to store: local, off\u2011site, object storage<\/strong><\/p>\n Tools and approaches<\/strong><\/p>\n Encryption and access control<\/strong><\/p>\n Encrypt backups, especially off\u2011site ones. Use built\u2011in encryption in borg\/restic or strong ciphers in archive tools. Create service accounts with minimal privileges, store keys\/secrets in a secret manager, and enable 2FA where possible.<\/p>\n Scheduling and retention (GFS example)<\/strong><\/p>\n Example policy: daily incrementals, weekly fulls; DB snapshots every 30 minutes; retention 14\/60\/90 days (daily\/weekly\/monthly). In object storage, enable versioning and immutable policies for 7\u201330 days to defend against ransomware and accidental deletion.<\/p>\n Verification and restore testing<\/strong><\/p>\n A backup you can\u2019t restore isn\u2019t a backup. Run monthly DR drills: rebuild a staging environment from backups, measure RTO, document steps. Automate integrity checks (hash verification), and perform targeted test restores of files and database dumps.<\/p>\n Monitoring and alerts<\/strong><\/p>\n The backup system must talk to you: failed dumps, out\u2011of\u2011space, unreachable bucket, expired keys. Send reports to email\/ChatOps, keep logs and set an SLA on response time.<\/p>\n Unihost checklist: step\u2011by\u2011step<\/strong><\/p>\n Edge cases and tips<\/strong><\/p>\n FAQ and conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n Q: How long to keep backups? Q: Is replication the same as backup? Q: What about infected backups? Q: What to do if there is not enough space? Q: Who is responsible for backups? Conclusion and next step<\/strong><\/p>\n The pain of data loss is immeasurably more expensive than setting up copies. Implement a simple 3-2-1 scheme, automate file and DB backups, enable encryption, monitoring and regular recovery tests. The Unihost team will help you select the infrastructure, set up a schedule and storage policies, and test the recovery so that in the event of any failure you will return to work within the declared RPO\/RTO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Backups are business insurance. A disk failure, a buggy plugin update, an accidental DROP TABLE or a breach can bring your site down. A solid backup plan lets you roll back to a working state in minutes or hours instead of suffering prolonged downtime. The key to \u201cpainless\u201d backups is a simple, automated strategy tied […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4276,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-webdev","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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\nA: Commonly 14\/60\/90 days plus offline release archives; adjust for compliance and budget.<\/p>\n
\nA: No \u2014 replication can copy mistakes; backups are point\u2011in\u2011time snapshots.<\/p>\n
\nA: Versioning and immutable policies help roll back to a clean point.<\/p>\n
\nA: Enable deduplication\/compression (borg\/restic), review retention, move to object storage.<\/p>\n
\nA: Assign a process owner and duty officers.<\/p>\n