Your Hosting Company Says "You Have No Backup" — What Now?

It's one of the worst phone calls there is: your site is gone, you ring your hosting company and hear "unfortunately we don't have a backup from that date". This article has two parts — what you can do now and what you need to set up so it never happens again.

Why is there no backup?

This usually isn't bad faith on the company's part, but the fact that most shared hosting plans make only a limited backup promise:

• Short retention: backups are often kept for only a few days. If you noticed the problem a week later, the backup has long since rotated out.
• The backup was on the same server: if there was a disk failure or the server was lost, the backup was hit by the same event.
• The account was closed: when an account is deleted over a late payment or a terms violation, the backups go with it.
• No backups were being taken at all: in some plans backups are a "best effort" and are not guaranteed.

The recovery routes still open to you

Hope may not be entirely lost. Try the following in order — some of them will bring back not all of your data, but a meaningful part of it.

1. Look on your own devices

Most people have partial backups without realising it: files you downloaded to your computer while developing, an archive you once emailed, a copy still held by your designer or a former developer. Carrying on from a six-month-old copy is far better than rebuilding a site from scratch.

2. Search engine caches and web archives

For content sites this route genuinely works. Search engine caches and internet archive services may hold older versions of your pages. This method recovers the text content ; it will not bring back your database, your user accounts or your orders. Still, it beats rewriting years of blog posts.

3. Sub-accounts and test copies

If you once set up a test environment, a staging copy or a trial installation on a subdomain, an older database may still be sitting there.

4. Data held by third-party services

Part of your site's data may live elsewhere too: order and customer records at your payment provider, your subscriber list in your email marketing tool, your invoices in your accounting software. You can export these and merge them into a new installation.

5. Your mailbox

Order notifications, sign-up emails and contact form messages may still be in your mailbox. This is especially useful in e-commerce for partly reconstructing order history.

So it never happens again

When the recovery attempts are over, the real lesson is this: backups are too critical to be left to the responsibility of the company you buy hosting from. The setup you need is simple at its core.

• Keep the backup somewhere independent of the site. When your server is lost, your backup must not be lost with it. This is the most basic rule of backups.
• Make it automatic. A manual backup gets forgotten during a busy week, and it cannot be taken retroactively.
• Set the retention yourself. Decide how many copies to keep, so that if you notice the problem late you can still go back to an older backup.
• Make the coverage complete. Files, database and email. If one of the three is missing, so is your recovery.
• Test it. A backup that cannot be restored is not a backup.

When you move to a new installation

If you have had to rebuild the site from scratch, switch backups on from day one. The most common mistake is saying "let me finish the site first and set up backups later" — and that "later" usually arrives after the second data loss.

Related pages: WordPress backup · server backup · backup pricing

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