Your sites are backed up automatically every day, and the schedule is yours to change. You can pick how often it runs and at what time.
Where
Open the site and select Backups. The schedule is shown just under the summary, with a Change link beside it. It also appears on the Security card on the site's own page.
How often
- Daily — and you choose the time of day. This is what we set up, and what we would recommend you keep.
- Weekly — you choose the day of the week and the time.
- Monthly — you choose the day of the month and the time.
Choosing a time
Pick a quiet hour for your visitors — the early hours usually. A backup is not disruptive, but it is work the server is doing, and there is no reason to have it running while your site is at its busiest.
If you publish on a routine, put the backup shortly after it. A backup taken an hour after your weekly update is far more useful than one taken an hour before.
Turning it off
Automatic backups can be switched off entirely. We would strongly advise against it. The whole value of an automatic backup is that it happens on the day you were not thinking about backups, and the cost of not having one is measured in rebuilt websites.
Weekly or monthly: what you are accepting
The gap between backups is how much work you can lose. On a daily schedule the worst case is one day. On a monthly one it is a month — every post, order and change since the last backup.
If you move a site off daily, take manual backups before you change anything. See Taking a backup yourself.
