Website Backups

Backups take a daily snapshot of a website and keep it somewhere safe, so a bad upload, a deleted file, or an edit that went wrong is something you can undo instead of something you have to rebuild.

A snapshot captures the whole website: every page, image, stylesheet, script, and file exactly as it was being served, plus the page settings that go with them (which page is the homepage, page visibility, custom URLs, redirects, password protection, and custom error pages).

Turning backups on

Open a website, go to Settings, then Backups, and switch backups on for that website. Backups are per website, not per account, so you choose exactly which websites are worth protecting.

The first snapshot is taken on the next daily run. After that it happens on its own, once a day.

What it costs

Each plan offers free backups included, but if you need more, you can buy them separately. Backups are billed per website at $5 a month. Large plans include three websites' worth of backups at no extra cost, and if you need more than that you can buy backup slots in packs, which get cheaper per slot the larger the pack.

A website that pays its own $5 does not use up one of your included slots. If your included slots are all in use, the Backups screen offers the paid option for that website instead.

Taking a backup yourself

The daily run is automatic, but you can also take one at any moment with the Backup now button. This is worth doing right before a change you are not sure about. Manual snapshots land in the same list as the daily ones and behave identically.

If nothing on the website has changed since the last snapshot, the button is unavailable and the daily run skips that website. There is no point storing a byte-for-byte copy of a snapshot you already have, and skipping it means your saved versions are actual versions rather than a row of identical dates.

Looking inside a backup before you use it

Every completed backup has a Preview action. It unpacks that version into a temporary space and opens it so you can browse it like a real website. Your live website carries on serving the current version the whole time, and the preview is deleted when you close it.

This is the reliable way to find the version you actually want, rather than guessing from a timestamp.

One thing to expect: if your pages link to assets from the website root, for example /style.css, those files will not load inside the preview and the page may look unstyled. The content and structure are still accurate. Pages using relative paths preview exactly as they look live.

Restoring

Choose a backup and click Restore. The files in that snapshot replace what is currently being served, and the page settings from that snapshot are put back too.

Three things happen automatically to make this safe:

1. A snapshot of the current state is taken first. It appears in the list as a "Pre-restore" backup, so if you restore the wrong version you can go straight back.
2. The archive is verified before anything is touched. If the downloaded copy does not match its recorded checksum, the restore is aborted and your live website is left alone.
3. Caches are cleared afterwards, so visitors see the restored version rather than a stale copy.

Only one backup or restore can run for a website at a time. If one is already in progress you will be asked to wait for it to finish.

Downloading a backup

Any backup can be downloaded as a single zip archive. Use it to keep your own offline copy, hand a specific version to a client, or pull one file out of an old version without touching the live website. The archive contains your website's files only, with our internal bookkeeping stripped out.

How many versions are kept

The 365 most recent backups per website are kept. Daily snapshots, ones you take yourself, and pre-restore safety copies all share those slots, so the oldest drops off as new ones arrive.

If there is a version you never want rotated out, for example a launch version or a state a client signed off on, mark it as kept. A kept backup sits outside that rolling window and stays until you release it yourself.

Turning backups off, and what happens to existing ones

If you switch backups off for a website, or lose the entitlement because a plan changed or your included slots went to other websites, new snapshots stop being taken. The ones you already have stay restorable, previewable, and downloadable for 30 more days. Switch backups back on inside that window and nothing is lost. After it passes, the stored archives are deleted.

If backups for a website are covered by a paid subscription, the toggle on the Backups screen is managed through that subscription: cancel the subscription to turn them off. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and you can undo it any time before then.

Good to know

• Backups do not slow your website down. Snapshots are taken by our infrastructure and written to separate storage. Nothing runs inside your pages, and visitors are served exactly as before.
• Archives are stored away from the machine serving your website, so a problem with your website is not also a problem with the copies you need to fix it.
• Deleting a website deletes its backups and cancels any backup subscription attached to it.
• In a workspace, backups follow the website-management permission: a member who can change website settings can take, preview, restore, and download backups.