We just heard of a sad story about an Australian web hosting company (Distribute.IT) that was hacked and all of the sites they hosted were deleted (almost 5 thousand of them). What’s even worse is that the attackers deleted and corrupted their backup archives, so they were not able to recover any of the files.
Yes, it means almost 5 thousand users lost all of their data. Hopefully, some of them had an offsite backup, but most of them didn’t. You can read the whole story here.
This is the important part:
“At this time, We regret to inform that the data, sites and emails that were hosted on Drought, Hurricane, Blizzard and Cyclone can be considered by all the experts to be unrecoverable,”
Wow. Make sure to start backing up your sites right now if you are not doing so. And choose an off site backup location if possible.
The key point is that backups should be inaccessible to attackers – for example, if you pull the data down from your web host to another server, or to a PC/Mac, you are OK as long as the web server has no way to login to the backup server (or PC).
Offsite backups don’t help if you don’t stick to this rule.
It’s even better to have offline backups as well, but that’s not really essential.