Manual or Automatic Backups: Which Route Should You Take?

The scariest of all horror stories ever told at night around a bonfire — scarier than the strange sounds, blood traces, ghosts, vampires, and other deadly matters — goes like this: “A prominent medical company that holds the health data and trust of millions of people was so sure about its security, it overlooked the need for website backups…”

scared girl

You probably don’t wanna hear the rest of the story.

Well, many other horror stories start exactly the same way. Let’s instead agree that you’re better and smarter than this story. Because you’re gonna backup your website. Properly.

Here you face a bunch of choices of your own. Even before you select the right service or plugin, you’re gonna decide whether you’re gonna go for traditional manual backups or jump into the embrace of automatic backups.

Let’s discuss each to understand what each of those terms stands for.

Manual backup

manual backup
The word manual speaks for itself. It’s for those who prefer taking things into their own hands. Meaning, you manually backup the website every time you feel it’s necessary.

Depending on which service you go for, there are specific instructions and ways of backing up the website. Another form of manual backup is manually downloading and creating backups for all your files and data. The good thing about the manual backup is that you have full control over when to backup your website.

However, trusting one’s memory to remind about the necessity of a backup is very risky indeed. Besides, you have to backup both the database and all your files and uploads.

Forgetting to backup one of the components that one time might bring about results you won’t be excited to have to deal with later.

Automatic backup

automatic scheduled backup
Faithful to the worldwide trend of automating everything, plugins and services are used for automating the backup process. You have to select the backup schedule that’s comfortable for your website (for example: monthly, weekly, daily, hourly), and then let the service take care of the rest.

There are countless plugins and services for automated backup to choose from, based on the supported schedule, speed and ease of use, security and space where the data is saved, and other categories you (should) care about.

Manual vs Automatic backup

Let’s now return to the the main question posed: Should you go with manual backup or automatic backup? There is firm evidence that suggests that in the Manual vs Automatic battle, Automatic backup wins:

It’s fast: With time being one of the most precious resources today, the fact that automatic backups are very time-saving is pretty notable and should catch your eye. All you have to do is plan your schedule in advance just once, and then the system takes care of the rest. You no longer need to remember to backup time after time after time.
It’s secure: As much as speed matters, security issues are of high importance, too. With automated backups, the service you are using is responsible for ensuring the security of your backed up data: for protecting your site from possible hacker attacks, software breakdowns, and other exploitation of vulnerabilities.
Recovery is easy: With automated backups, if something goes wrong, you can restore your website in no time. Whilst, if you were doing a full backup manually, you’d have to go over and recover every single lost file.
Differential (synchronized) backup: There is no use backing up the same files over and over again every single time you backup the website. That’s where a differential backup solution comes in handy. When you go for automatic scheduled backups, you can choose a service that offers synced backups, those that backup only the changes that happened after the last full backup of the website, saving you both time and space.

exception case
There are always exceptions, aren’t there? Suppose, you have decided on a weekly backup schedule but made major changes to your website today and the next scheduled backup is in 4 days.

In situations like this one, a one-time manual backup is a smart decision. So, sometimes the regularly scheduled backups should be combined with occasional manual backups to cover the full span of your website security.

Choosing a backup solution

After you’ve hopefully set your heart on your desirable backup strategy, I suggest you proceed to choosing the best backup service out there and pick out a correct schedule for your site while you’re at it, too.

No hassle – we’ve got you covered! 10Web has already created an absolutely amazing, easy-to-use backup service of your dreams.

backup service

You get to choose from various backup schedules, including real-time backup, which will make sure your website is backed up every hour.
The differential (sync) backups, you can perform with this service, will save your time and space. Read more about differential backup here.
Your backups are not saved just somewhere, but on the popular Amazon S3 cloud storage, so you can be certain they’re absolutely secure. Looking for an alternative? You also get alternative storage places, such as Dropbox, Gdrive, and Rackspace, if you prefer those for some reason.
You can easily download your backups and keep them at hand.
One of the greatest features is the system-level daily backup solution which means you can always restore the changes made to your website in the previous 10 days.
Finally, you’ll only have to click a button to restore the latest version of your website.

If you have a hard time figuring out which backup schedule is right for you, this article will come to your rescue.

Now that you read the article, the horror stories no longer threaten to become your stories. But, since the world of websites has many more aspects other than data loss because of a lack of a backup system, you should consider subscribing to 10Web 10 component website building and managing platform, to access the freshest, coolest, quickest processing and the best services/plugins on the market. What’s your backup strategy? Let us know in the comments!