Home/Notes/backups: a field note from a roofing crew
backups: a field note from a roofing crew
23 Aug 2024
How a roofing crew deals with backups — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a plugin login nobody has used since March. This breaks backups for a roofing crew.
a roofing crew did not want to hear about backups. They wanted to know: will the site work tomorrow morning. The answer was yes, but only if we fix a plugin login nobody has used since March today.
We once forgot to renew backups for a weekend project and it took down a page that a roofing crew linked to from a print flyer. We now set auto-renew on everything.
The vendor promised a roofing crew that backups was handled. We verified: it was not. Trust but verify has saved more uptime than any product we have used.
When a roofing crew moved hosts, the outage was not the new box — it was a plugin login nobody has used since March. We keep TTL short the week of a move, then raise it once everything is stable.
WordPress can handle backups with a plugin. But the plugin adds JavaScript, a dashboard, and a support ticket when it conflicts with the next update. We wrote four lines of config instead.
There is a difference between a site that loads and a site that works. backups is part of the second category for a roofing crew.
Early on we tried to automate backups for a roofing crew with a cron job. It ran as root, silently overwrote a manual change, and took down their mail. Lesson learned.
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