What it is
A spare copy of your data that saves the day when the server breaks, files get deleted by mistake or ransomware encrypts everything.
How we use it
We set up automatic backups with rotation (old copies delete themselves) โ we never rely on "I'll do it by hand later".
Where a backup helps a business
- A bot or website holds orders, payments and customers, and losing them means losing money.
- A server can die along with its disk, and a provider can shut down.
- An employee can delete data by accident, and an update can corrupt the database.
How we use it
- A copy that is checked. In the finance assistant a daily database dump is checked for integrity and rotated, and a restore can be tried on a separate database without touching the live one.
- Copies on another machine. In Peregovorka the database is snapshotted nightly, and a separate machine collects the snapshots and verifies a restore; a failure arrives as a Telegram message.
- A copy in the cloud. The subscription-sales bot makes a JSON dump of users and the log, saves it locally and uploads it to Google Drive through a service account; a final copy is made when the bot stops.
- A file in Telegram. In the club loyalty card the database is a single SQLite file, sent once a day to the main administrators in Telegram.
- Server snapshots. On the websites server nightly mail snapshots are kept for two weeks, and some sites get database and file snapshots.
Backups are part of our bots and infrastructure work wherever client data is stored.
Common problems
- The backup was never tested. A copy nobody has restored from may turn out empty or corrupted.
- The copy sits on the same disk. If the server dies, the backups next to it die too. A copy must live on another machine or in other storage.
- Secrets in the copy. In the IT help desk a database dump goes to Telegram weekly, so registry passwords are stored only in encrypted form.
- "We'll set it up later." Some WordPress demo sites on our server have no scheduled backups yet, and this is written down among the limitations rather than forgotten.
When you do not need it
If the data can be rebuilt from source, such as a site made of files in git or static pages, a separate server backup adds almost nothing: the copy is already in the repository. Backups are needed where data is born in operation: orders, payments, correspondence.