Losing data can be a traumatic moment. Most of us have felt the pain of losing an important document (or worse.)

That's why we sometimes get asked by folks - "Can I backup my site and store it on my computer?"

While it's not currently possible to perform your own backup and download it (it's on our roadmap for end of 2019), we do have an incredibly robust backup plan that I'll describe in detail for you below. (Hopefully knowing some of the details of what we're doing to safeguard your data behind the scenes will help!)

We create backups of your site data in 3 ways:

1. Every day, we automatically create a "snapshot" of your site at 7am and 7pm GMT. We store those snapshots for 5 days. This means that we'll ALWAYS have the last 5 days of your site backed up securely. We perform these database snapshots with Amazon RDS. Read more here.

2. Every day at 7am and 7pm GMT we do an automatic database dump of all user accounts. We place this database dump in a completely new Amazon S3 bucket and keep a rolling store of backups for one full month.

3. We also keep 3 additional "safety" database dumps from the previous month taken on the 1st, the 15th, and the 30th.

Why is Amazon S3 the most secure place for your files possible?

From the Amazon S3 site, Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (that's eleven 9s!) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world. Keeping that in mind, it's fair to say that your data is more secure on S3 than in pretty much any storage system around!