Quick answer: Back up as often as the amount of data you can afford to lose — your RPO. For most business sites that means a nightly full cycle; busy shops and apps add hourly database dumps; static sites can live with weekly. If losing an hour of orders hurts, back up at least hourly.
Overview
The question is not technical but economic: re-entering a day of blog edits is annoying, losing a day of e-commerce orders is money. Define the Recovery Point Objective (how much recent data may vanish) per system, then schedule backups to meet it — databases usually need tighter RPO than files.
Before you start
- List what changes on your server and how fast: database rows, uploads, configs, code.
- Decide the pain threshold per dataset: an hour? a day? a week?
- Check storage math — tighter RPO multiplies snapshots; see estimating storage size.
Typical schedules that work
- Blog / brochure site: nightly files + database, 2–4 weeks retention.
- WooCommerce / SaaS: hourly DB dumps + nightly files; keep hourly for 48 h, dailies for a month.
- Static site (built from git): weekly backup of server config; the content lives in the repo anyway.
- Dev/test boxes: weekly, or none if everything is reproducible — but be honest about "reproducible".
Common issues
- One-size-fits-all: backing up a busy database nightly because "the whole server is nightly" quietly sets your RPO to 24 h.
- Schedules without retention: frequency says how fresh; retention says how far back — you need both.
- Cron drift: jobs disabled during maintenance and never re-enabled — check logs weekly (see automation).
When to contact support
Unsure what a sane setup looks like for your stack? Describe your data and traffic in a ticket — the team can sanity-check your plan and size a Storage VPS to match it.
Frequently asked questions
What is RPO and why does it matter for backups?
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum data age you accept losing. If losing more than an hour of orders is unacceptable, your database needs backups at least every hour.
Is a nightly backup enough for a business site?
For content sites usually yes. For shops and applications that write data all day, add hourly database dumps — files change rarely, but the database is where money lives.
Do backup frequency and retention differ?
Yes. Frequency determines how fresh your newest copy is; retention determines how far back you can reach. A good setup defines both, per dataset, and automates the pruning.
Related articles
- Backup retention policy explained
- How to automate backups with cron
- How to estimate backup storage size
- How to create a disaster recovery plan
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