Don't be a fool on April Fool day! Backup Your Magento 2 store today

April Fools' Day is a time of good-natured jokes and fun! Who can resist the desire to fool friends with the most unexpected pranks? In our country in the city Odessa the 1st of April becomes an official city holiday. In Ukraine, the banalest, but perhaps, the most widespread trick is to say that someone's back is dirty from a chalk. It's quite an innocent joke and it has become a tradition on April’s Fool Day.

The most daring thing to do is to joke with your colleagues at work. But team players should choose the theme and the hardness of their jokes carefully because everything related to work could become too serious. Somebody can tell a programmer he missed an important call that was shifted for an hour earlier and then laugh at his panic. Or a funny prank is to replace sugar with salt and enjoy the spectacle when coffee at the dinner table no one liked. Or someone can turn on the work computer and might not find any data on the backend of the store, haha!

Oh, but wait. It won't be funny at all!

Despite the celebration of April’s Fool Day with laughter and fooling around, someone may not be happy. Don't let yourself be a fool and take care of your data! There're many circumstances when your data is at risk of being lost. The Magento 2 community cares about your security and your data's safety with system backup capability.

What is a system backup in Magento 2?

Magento may ask you to back up your store in whole or in part. You can back up everything that is necessary for your website viability, for example - system files, databases, media files, statistics, and more. Backups will provide an excellent protection level and save months and maybe years of restore work for your website. At any time, your programmers can roll one step back if something went wrong.

• Why is cloud storage the best backup solution for your Magento 2 store?

How to backup a Magento 2 website?

Magento file or database backups could be created via the backend both manually, or automated as you can set up scheduled backups.

In order to make a backup manually from the admin panel, go to System - Tools - Backups.

You can use three buttons to make different backups.

The System Backup button saves the system files of code itself. Database backup makes a copy of the actual database information. Database and Media Backup makes a media folder with all of your images and videos. Take into consideration that this folder should have a lot of space. Magento uses TGZ format for the system backups and database and media backups.

To make a Database backup or Database and Media backup, you should click on the propper button, name it and choose whether you want to put your store in maintenance mode while the system does it or not. Don't use this feature when your site online and customers are shopping.

If you want to make a System Backup, you should do the same thing; the only difference is you can exclude the media folder from the backup if you wish to save only code data without a media folder.

A record for each backup appears in the grid on the Backups page, and deleting it from the list deletes the archived file.

When you create a file, you can Rollback or save it to your computer by clicking in. You can also see the file’s size on the dashboard.

Backup storage

Secure backup storage is no less critical than its correct creation. We must remember just one but vital rule about web store backups:

• You should store backup copies of your files somewhere separate from your work computers.

It's important that you'll have a copy of the previous working version of the site in case of local technical problems and have access to it at any time. Of course, there are several options for saving the backup remotely, but we recommend the most modern and convenient one - cloud storage. In the previous article, we talked about the benefits of cloud storage in more detail.

As of 2020, around 50% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud.

Such a high percentage of cloud storage supporters among businesses can't help but be convinced of the correctness of using them.

We, at Mageside, created an incredibly convenient and functional module Backup to Dropbox that will appeal to Dropbox users. Or if you have not yet decided on a service to save important data of your online store, we recommend reading the following article:

• Why do you need to backup your online store with the Backup To Dropbox module for Magento 2?
• Scary Halloween tales or How to save your Magento 2 store

Happy April Fools Day!

We wish this day to bring only funny jokes!