Most business owners assume their website has backups because someone, at some point, said it does. Very few have ever watched one get restored. That gap between assuming backups work and knowing they work is where a lot of businesses find out what a hosting failure or hacked site costs them.
In practice it usually means a backup job runs automatically overnight, an addon or plugin takes a database snapshot, or the hosting provider includes backups as part of the package. All of those things can be true and the backups can still be useless the day they're needed. Nobody has opened one to check what's actually inside it.
A few problems show up again and again. The backup job stops running quietly, months before anyone notices, and the most recent file is older than anyone realises. The database dump completes but is missing tables or corrupted partway through, something that only becomes obvious on restore. Uploaded images and files are stored separately from the database and never get backed up alongside it, so a restored site ends up with broken images throughout. The retention window is short enough that a problem sitting unnoticed for a few weeks gets backed up over the last good copy.
Backups run quietly in the background, and a working backup looks identical to a broken one until someone tries to use it. Most hosting setups don't alert anyone when a backup job fails, so the first time a business finds out their backups don't work is during the exact moment they need them.
Testing a restore means running the process itself, not just checking that a backup file exists: restoring the most recent backup to a separate environment, confirming the site loads correctly, and checking that recent content and orders are present. Timing how long the whole thing takes matters too. A six-hour restore on a business-critical site is six hours of downtime worth planning for, not discovering partway through an outage.
If you're not sure your backups have ever actually been tested, get in touch with Karl to find out.
Related Services
Most businesses with an ExpressionEngine site didn’t choose ExpressionEngine themselves. A web agency built the site, recommended the CMS, and handled everything from launch onward. That arrangement works well until it doesn’t, and there are several ways it can stop working.
Plenty of ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS sites run on a single relationship: a freelancer who built the site years ago and has quietly maintained it since, or an in-house hire who set everything up and never wrote any of it down. That works fine for years. Then that person goes on holiday during a launch, gets a new job, or stops replying to emails, and the business finds out how much depended on one inbox.
Most clients come to us when their site has started to feel like a risk rather than an asset. Whether the agency relationship has ended, an upgrade has been delayed, or the site has simply grown beyond what it can handle, a conversation costs nothing.
Get in touch with KarlTrusted by established businesses and growing brands across the UK
Expression 37 works with a small number of clients at any one time. These are some of them.
Karl founded Expression 37 in 2007 and has worked exclusively with ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS ever since. He does not take on work in other platforms and does not hand work to other developers. Expression 37 is deliberately small, because the kind of support that matters to clients with business-critical sites is specific to their site, not something that scales in the conventional sense. If you work with Expression 37, you work with Karl.
Find out how we workKarl has been instrumental in delivering the ExpressionEngine development requirements for our client. Karl very quickly became part of our extended team as he is reliable, dependable and thorough in everything he does. Karl has a genuine desire to see his clients succeed and he will go out of his way to help them achieve that. Karl worked hard on our projects and was so helpful all along the way. He is driven, talented and an absolute pleasure to work with! Any organisation would be lucky to have Karl on their team.
Wayne Smallman
Octane Ltd.