Why You Should Trust Your Site to Jetpack Backup

Backups are a critical aspect of website management. They protect your files and customer data, as well as all the hard work and money you’ve invested in your site. Who will you trust with your data? There are a lot of options out there. 

Jetpack Backup is incredibly user friendly — you can restore your website, even if you can’t log into your WordPress dashboard, in a few clicks — but ease of use isn’t everything. How do you know that your data is safe, secure, and available when you need it? Let’s take a look at why Jetpack Backup is a reliable solution.

Jetpack Backup is supported by a team of experts

Automattic, the creator of Jetpack and WordPress.com, has been backing up websites for ten years. Jetpack Backup isn’t a generic solution: it was created specifically for WordPress and is used by WordPress.com to back up all of their top-tier business and eCommerce sites. 

“That’s hundreds of thousands of sites,” Steve Seear, Code Wrangler and Team Lead at Automattic noted, “And the backup technology has been specifically developed with those sites in mind. It’s something that we use ourselves.” 

That’s right: it’s so reliable that Automattic uses it for their own customers. 

“Our support engineers are experienced with all kinds of security incidents. These are the kinds of problems they work on every day.”

Steve Seear, Jetpack code wrangler, Team Lead

Jetpack also includes unrivaled support from WordPress experts. Since Jetpack offers additional security features — downtime monitoring, brute force attack protection, and security scanning, which often prevent the need to restore a backup in the first place — their support team knows how to handle any issue that might arise on your site. If your site is hacked and you reach out to support, they can provide guidance on tightening security in addition to helping you restore a backup. 

“Our support engineers are experienced with all kinds of security incidents. These are the kinds of problems they work on every day. They’re very good with advice and support around any kind of security incident, even if you’re not paying for a security product,” Seear explained.

Jetpack Backup stores files off site in multiple, secure locations

You shouldn’t rely only on backups provided by your host because they’re stored on the same server as the site itself. “If your host is having technical problems and your site goes down, you may not even get to export your site to another host,” Seear points out.

With Jetpack, backups are stored in multiple places so, if you have a problem, you can clone your site somewhere else. The first is an Automattic data center in the U.S. — the same data center that hosts all Automattic sites, including those hosted on WordPress.com. “That’s the kind of care we take. It’s our entire business,” Seear says. For redundancy, an additional, encrypted backup is sent to a separate server, so there are two levels of protection:

• Encryption converts your data into a secret code to keep your information (and your customers’ data!) safe from prying eyes.
• Redundancy means that the same data is held in multiple locations — in this case, your website files are stored on two different servers, so your backup has its own backup. If anything happens to one set of data, Jetpack can still restore your site. 

The off-site backups are kept in a completely different place than the rest of your website files, so if your server goes down or is hacked, you still have a clean backup. This also means that if your site is inaccessible, you can restore a full backup without having to know any complicated code. “No matter what kind of problem you run into, Jetpack has your back,” Seear says. 

Jetpack Backup offers both daily and real-time options

Since every business and website’s are different, a reliable backup solution should offer options that let you pick the right fit for your needs. Jetpack Backup offers two timing options:

• Daily backups are performed automatically, once a day, and are a great solution for sites that don’t change very often. 
• Real-time backups are saved every time an action takes place — an updated page, purchased product, added comment, and other changes you don’t want to lose. These are particularly useful for eCommerce websites that don’t want to miss out on a single transaction or blogs that publish new posts regularly.

“Real-time backups are really useful because you can just skip back to a recent change,” Seear says, “It’s almost like a development tool for your site. If you make a change you don’t like, revert to a recent change point.”

That’s exactly how WordPress agency FreshySites uses Jetpack Backup for the 1,200 websites they manage. Their founder, Ben, told us that, “Our developers use backups all the time. It’s a one-click way to return to where we were before things got wonky. It gives us a little emergency parachute needed during development. If we’re working on a customization that breaks everything, we lose minutes, not hours.”

Jetpack Backup values your data and privacy

Your website is your passion and your livelihood, and protecting that is serious business. If your credit card expires or doesn’t go through, your backups don’t disappear; there’s a long grace period during which you can still restore your site. If you cancel your account and — as things often happen when we least want them to — your website is hacked the next day, the support team will still be able to help you get back up and running.

That being said, if, for any reason, you do want your information and backups permanently erased, Jetpack can do that, too. Jetpack and parent company Automattic take data privacy very seriously and operate in full accordance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which you can learn even more about here.

Trust your site to Jetpack Backup

Jetpack Backup is trusted by individuals, businesses, and agencies to protect their files and private data. You can’t afford to choose the wrong backup solution for your most important information; choose the one built for WordPress and backed by Automattic. 

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