Backups and restore

Backups on the Backups tab are on demand. You press Create backup, one is made. Nothing on this tab runs on a schedule, so treat it as the snapshot you take before doing something risky, not as your safety net.

Limits

Limit	Value
Backups per hour, per site	1
Backups per day, per site	3
Backups kept at once, per site	5
How long one is kept	72 hours
Restores per 24 hours, per site	10

The button greys out when you are inside the hourly or daily window:

Max 1 backup per hour, 3 per day.

At five live backups you get:

maximum backups reached

Only restores that start count toward the restore limit. Past ten in 24 hours, Restore is refused until the oldest of them is 24 hours old.

72 hours is the whole retention

A backup taken on Friday afternoon is gone by Monday morning. Nothing extends it, and nothing warns you before it expires. If a backup matters, download it. A downloaded file has no expiry.

What is in one

Two parts, both listed on the backup with their size:

• Files. Everything under public_html, as a .tar.gz. Files you keep outside public_html are not included.
• Databases. One gzipped SQL dump per database on the site, tables and data. Views, triggers and stored routines are not included. A single row can take up to 16 MiB in the dump; a database with a larger row is not saved, and the backup names the table. The same goes for a database whose compressed dump exceeds 5 GiB.

A backup is marked Completed only when every part was saved. If a part fails, the backup is marked Failed and the row names what is missing. The parts that were saved can still be downloaded, but a failed backup cannot be restored.

Downloading

Download files and Download DB give you a link that is valid for 15 minutes. Start the download promptly, or generate a fresh link.

Restoring

Restore puts back the database, not the files

The Restore button restores database content only. Your files are left exactly as they are.

To roll files back, download the files archive and unpack it over the site yourself with SFTP. There is no button for that.

Only a Completed backup that contains a database offers Restore. While a site is offline because its package ended, Restore is unavailable; backups can still be created and downloaded.

Before anything is overwritten, the databases about to be replaced are backed up and that backup appears in the list like any other. If it cannot be taken, nothing is restored. It is kept for 72 hours like the rest but counts toward none of the limits above.

Only one backup or restore runs per site at a time. While one is running, Create backup and Restore are unavailable. One that has not finished two hours after it started is marked Failed.

What restore does, precisely:

• Every table that was in the backup is dropped and recreated from the dump. Anything written to those tables since the backup is gone.
• Tables created after the backup are not in the dump and are left in place. The result is your old data plus your new tables, not a clean rewind.
• Triggers on the restored tables are removed with them and not recreated, because the dump does not contain them.
• The site is restarted at the end, so it picks up the restored data.
• A database that no longer exists on the site cannot be restored into. Renaming or deleting a database makes its dumps unusable.

A failed restore can leave a database half restored

The restore stops at the first statement that fails and is marked Failed, with the reason under Restores on the tab. Tables replaced up to that point stay replaced. The entry names the backup that holds the state from before the restore; restore that one to go back.

Restore runs in the background. The tab shows progress; the site stays up throughout, serving whatever state the database is in at that moment. Do not restore a live shop mid-afternoon.

The backup you cannot see

Independently of the tab above, the platform keeps its own backups of hosting data. You have no access to them and they do not appear anywhere in the portal.

If you lose data and there is no backup of your own left, open a support ticket. A restore from the platform side is possible and is carried out by us. Do not plan around it: it is manual, it is not immediate, and it is not a substitute for downloading the backups you care about.

What's next

• Databases for what a dump contains
• Files, console and cron for unpacking a file archive back onto the site