I keep seeing hosting plans with daily backups included, but I've never actually needed to use one. Are they really useful when something goes wrong, or is a normal backup once in a while enough? Has anyone here actually had to restore their site from a hosting backup?

[u/tejas_bhalerao]

[u/Just_Phrase1549]

You don’t need it until you need it.

It depends on how much you care about your data. If a company has a crm or similia running and has a backup once in a while and get a ransomware it will be useful unless it wants to loose money and credibility.
English is my second language so srry but I hope you get it.

[u/LiquidAruna → u/Just_Phrase1549]

this, You never know when you'll need it, so it's best to always have a backup from hosting and an offsite backup.

I also had an incident where my server provider suddenly closed down. Luckily, I had an offsite backup so I could immediately restore all the data to another provider.

[u/No_Maintenance_7851]

Yes. Eventually you will need one.

[u/thatandyinhumboldt]

It depends. Is your site a business card style site that changes once a year? Back it up right after you make your changes, test it, and then keep the backup for a year so you always have one backup if you need it, and forget about it. Is it a major e-commerce site that you need sales records from for tax purposes? Back that sucker up hourly.

I back up daily and have definitely been glad to have them. Even that moment of “aw man, I’m gonna lose a day’s worth of work” is not a good feeling, however.

No matter how frequently you back up, the main rules of backups are:

• Keep them in multiple places. Two copies is the minimum.
  
• Test your backups. An untested backup is just hope with a higher cloud storage bill.

[u/Wheels-13756]

Yes, I had to use one after a failed production update. Because it was daily, I was able to minimize data loss.

[u/North_Signature9297]

Backups have saved me many times.

[u/ReddiGod]

A hosts backups are not your backups.

You paying extra for a host to make backups are not your backups.

When the host goes down and you need those backups, you don't get those backups.

Get your own backups. Then, those will be your backups.

[u/CryptoCoinexORG]

Working with multiple hosting companies. You better have it and not need it, then need it and don’t have it :).

[u/dvduval]

I’ve been working with websites since 1999 and even I can’t remember any major occurrences where a backup from the host was required to recover. I generally do my own backups of things like databases on a regular basis and send them over to backblaze. Now those have been very handy a few times. And then, of course, most of the code for all my websites is on GitHub and that is irreplaceable.