Backups fail quietly. Nobody notices until the day they are needed, which is the worst possible moment to discover the job has been failing since March.
The failure modes
- The backup covers files but not the database, so the site restores as an empty shell.
- The backup lives on the same server as the site it protects.
- Retention is shorter than the time it takes to notice a problem — a defacement found on day ten, with seven days of backups.
- The backup is fine, but nobody knows the restore procedure and the person who did is on leave.
The fifteen-minute test
Pick a non-critical site. Restore yesterday's backup to a staging environment or a subdomain. Load the homepage, log into the admin, and check that content from the last few days is present. That is the entire test, and it catches every failure mode above.
Do it once a quarter and write down the steps while you are in there. The point of the note is that someone else can follow it under pressure.
What we run
Daily off-server backups on every plan, with retention from 7 to 30 days depending on the plan, restorable by you from cPanel without a support ticket. That last part matters: a restore that requires waiting on someone else is a restore that happens hours later than it should.