The phone call from a former client that made us take long-term maintenance seriously: “Do you have a backup of my website?  I accidentally deleted my site from my server!”  It’s not that easy to delete your whole site, but from time to time people do.  Not as catastrophically as the owner of a web hosting company managed to.  (He deleted his site and all his client’s sites too!)  But still possible.

Luckily we did have a backup of his original site.  Even more luckily his hosting company had a 24-hour backup.

Our former client had simply deleted what looked to him like a copy of his site in a former employee’s folders that turned out to be an alias to his main site.  Deleting that deleted all his on-site backups too!  Yikes!

Other simpler can lose your whole site including your on-site backups?

• You get a new credit card and forget to update with your host, who then terminates your account.
• Your site ends up hacked, corrupted, or encrypted by “ransomeware.”

That’s why we don’t just regularly backup our clients websites but back them up to secured, encrypted cloud servers.  And hold on backups for up to 6 months (and use a less frequent backup system and store those backups for years.)