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

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

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.

Check the sizes before trusting a backup

The two parts are made independently, and a backup is marked complete even when one of them failed. A backup showing a file size but no database size, or the other way round, is a partial backup. Look at the row after it finishes.

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.

The restore dialog says what it will do:

Warning: This will overwrite your current database. A safety backup is recommended before restoring.

Read that as an instruction, not a suggestion: no safety backup is taken for you. Create one first, so you can get back to where you were if the restore is not what you wanted.

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.
• 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.

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