Guide topic

Backup storage and recovery guides

Backup guides covering website and server backups, off-site storage, retention, restore testing, database strategy, capacity planning, full vs incremental copies, and SFTP.

Backups

Understand the system, not just the setting.

A backup is useful only when it preserves a recoverable copy of something you care about. These guides focus on sizing, separation, restore planning, transfer methods, retention, and the failure modes that a second copy is supposed to protect against.

See DotMoose backup storage

28 guides

Start with the problem you are solving.

All guide topics →

Website backup service: what to ask before trusting it

Compare a website backup service by what it protects, backup frequency, off-site separation, retention, encryption, restore process, monitoring, and export access.

Server backup Canada: how to plan an off-server copy

Plan server backups in Canada around recovery goals, application-consistent data, encryption, off-server storage, retention, bandwidth, access controls, and restore testing.

Offsite backup storage: why separation matters

Offsite backup storage keeps recovery copies away from the live system. Learn which failures separation protects against and why redundancy, snapshots, sync, and backup are not interchangeable.

Backup retention policy: how many restore points do you need?

Design backup retention around recovery windows, data change rate, unnoticed corruption, legal or business requirements, storage growth, and the time needed to detect incidents.

Backup restore testing: how to prove a copy is usable

Backup restore testing verifies that archives can be retrieved, decrypted, imported, started, and used. Build restore drills around real recovery objectives rather than a green backup-job status.

Database backup strategy: how to protect changing data

A database backup strategy should address consistency, recovery points, transaction volume, dumps vs physical copies, encryption, off-site storage, retention, and restore verification.

Backup retention planning: choose how many recovery points to keep

Set backup retention from recovery needs, change rate, storage cost, compliance and deletion risk so recent mistakes and older corruption remain recoverable.

Backup recovery drills: prove the restore process before an outage

Run isolated recovery tests, measure restore time, verify application state and record missing dependencies so the backup plan is based on tested recovery.

Backup encryption basics: protect copies at rest and in transit

Choose where backup data is encrypted, how keys are stored and recovered, and how restore operators gain access without putting the only key beside the backup.

Backup RPO and RTO: turn recovery objectives into a backup design

Use acceptable data loss and recovery time to choose backup frequency, restore tooling, replication and operational priorities for each workload.

Backup capacity planning: estimate storage from change rate and retention

Model source size, daily change, compression, deduplication, retention and growth so backup storage is sized from the workload instead of one full-copy estimate.

SFTP backup automation: transfer backups without hard-coding a password

Automate SFTP backup transfers with scoped keys, host-key verification, retention, logging and failure alerts, then test that the remote copy can restore.

Offsite backup strategy: keep a recovery copy outside the failure domain

Separate backup copies from the production account, server and location where appropriate, then test access during the kind of outage the copy is meant to survive.

RAID is not a backup: what redundancy protects and what it cannot recover

Understand how RAID handles some disk failures while deletion, corruption, compromise and site loss still require independent, versioned backup copies.

Snapshots vs backups: know which failures each recovery method can survive

Compare snapshot speed and storage coupling with independent backup retention, application consistency and offsite recovery before relying on one mechanism.

ZFS mirror basics: redundancy, usable capacity and what happens on disk failure

Understand two-way ZFS mirrors, resilvering, scrub checks and fault tolerance while keeping separate backups for failures a mirror cannot undo.

ZFS scrub planning: how often to verify stored data and mirror health

Schedule ZFS scrubs around pool size, disk workload and monitoring, then investigate checksum errors and degraded devices instead of treating a scrub as repair by itself.

ZFS snapshot planning: use retention and naming that make rollback understandable

Choose snapshot frequency and retention from change rate and recovery needs, monitor space use, and replicate important recovery points outside the source pool.

Storage quota planning: set limits without surprising a growing workload

Measure current use, growth, temporary files and operational headroom before setting quotas, then alert before the limit turns a normal write into an outage.

Bandwidth capacity planning: size links from real traffic peaks and transfer windows

Use sustained throughput, burst demand, backup or replication windows and protocol overhead to decide whether a network link has enough usable capacity.

Website backups for beginners: how many copies are enough?

A beginner guide to website backup frequency, retention, files vs databases, off-site copies, WordPress restores, email, and why one recent backup is not always enough.

Backup storage is not the same as file sync

What another copy should protect you from: deletion, ransomware, and hardware failure.

How much backup storage do I need? Sizing examples and calculator

Estimate backup storage from protected data and retained versions. Compare full and incremental examples, allow headroom and use the free calculator.

Full vs incremental backups: what is the difference?

Compare full and incremental backups, including storage use, backup windows, restore chains, retention, verification, and why the right strategy depends on recovery goals.

What is SFTP, and when should you use it?

Learn what SFTP is, how it differs from FTP and FTPS, how SSH keys fit in, and why restricted SFTP is useful for website and backup transfers.

WordPress hosting checklist: what to verify before launch

A pre-launch WordPress checklist covering HTTPS, backups, updates, email delivery, DNS, security, performance, and recovery.

VPS security checklist for a new Linux server

A practical Linux VPS hardening checklist covering access, updates, firewall rules, service exposure, backups, logs, TLS, secrets, and monitoring.

WordPress backup restore: what has to come back?

A complete WordPress restore may require files, uploads, plugins, themes, configuration, and the database. Learn how to verify that a backup can rebuild the site.