The backup you've never restored is not a backup

Everyone agrees backups matter, so almost every site has something — a plugin scheduled years ago, a host feature ticked at signup. The uncomfortable question isn't "do you have backups?". It's: "have you ever restored one?"

Because until a backup has been restored, it isn't a backup. It's a hope.

The three quiet failures

• It stopped running. A plugin update broke the schedule, storage filled up, credentials expired — and the "last backup" everyone assumes exists is from eleven months ago. Nothing alerts you, because the thing that would alert you is the thing that's broken.
• It's incomplete. Database but no uploads folder. Files but no database. Everything except wp-config.php. It looks like a backup right up until the restore, when half the site turns out to be missing.
• It lives on the same server as the site. A server failure, a full-disk event or a ransomware-style compromise takes the site and its backups in the same moment. A backup that shares fate with the thing it protects is decoration.

The ten-minute test

• Find your most recent backup and check its date. Yesterday? Good. Last quarter? That's your answer already.
• Open the archive and confirm it contains the database dump, the uploads folder, themes and plugins.
• Restore it somewhere that isn't the live site — a staging copy or a local install — and click around. The restore is the test; nothing else counts.

If step three feels intimidating, that itself is worth knowing before an emergency, not during one.

An untested backup is a guess with a schedule.

On our plans backups run daily, go off-site, keep 30 days of history — and get periodically restore-tested, because the day you need a backup is the worst possible day to find out it doesn't work.