Scary Halloween tales or How to save your Magento 2 store

Halloween is coming, and as a good tradition, we are ready to tell you new scary stories. But this time, we won't disclose real names. We offer you to play a game of imagination and try to feel episodes from which the blood runs cold!

Let's dive into the first story.

  • One morning on October 31, the holiday bustle spreads everywhere. Excited children walked around the streets, discussing their future costumes for the Halloween evening. Adults went shopping, bought candies and other sweets. Workers of the roadside cafes finished decorating their shop windows and tables outside.

    Stephen has never adored Halloween celebrations. All those costumes and decorations scared him a lot. Even this beautiful morning, he started to wait impatiently till the night of horrors passed.

    He had a small but quite successful online store of tasty sweets based on Magento 2 platform. His subordinates tried not to remind him of the holiday and worked as if it’s a normal day. But, anyway, the sale and sending candies increased many times thanks to the holiday traditions! That was the only thing that pleased Stephen.

    No one was surprised when lightning and rain started this morning. The weather added to the spookiness to the holiday expectations. Halloween should be whimsical!

    However, around 11 am his own software tester ran into Stephen's office and started yelling about some catastrophic errors. As it turned out, someone made a huge code mistake in the development team, and now, all the integrated features in the store for the last month worked incorrectly. Moreover, they influenced almost all the shop main functionality.

    The losses immediately began to increase. Users couldn't order candies; bad reviews popped up on the forums and crushed the reputation as the same as a woodcutter destroying a forest with an ax.

    Stephen didn’t panic and was sure that he would easily solve this trouble in a few hours. He was prepared because he knew that he has the backups that are automatically created each week. All he had to do is to roll back the previous version of the web store that will allow people to shop right away, and start to work on the updated versions' errors just then.

    Lightning is what he saw outside the window and what he felt inside his bones when he fully realized the terrible news. The abnormal downpour damaged the servers and caused a catastrophic loss of all his data.

Do you already have goosebumps on your skin? Because we have! But don't worry! Your Magento 2 store is safe from such terrible events. We believe you save the backup of the web store in one of the cloud services like Dropbox. Also, we are glad that our Backup to Dropbox module for Magento 2 could help you create the perfect well-timed backups, and you won't be afraid of data loss at all.

And if not yet... say hello to Stephen :)

BTW, don't worry about Stephen. After this incident, he also installed the Backup and Dropbox module. And on that eve of Halloween, he handed over all the unsold sweets to the neighbors' children. Now he celebrates Halloween with his workers at the office.

The next story is no less spooky.

  • Chip was a good guy but also too hasty. He was fussing when he delayed the queue at the coffee machine. So he always clicked on the first version of the coffee he saw. While waiting for the elevator for more than three seconds, he began to twitch because it would be faster to go down by the stairs. In other words, he was always in a hurry, but we know that the fuss hasn’t helped anyone yet.

    He was working in a large Magento 2 based online store of fabrics as a manager. Among his other duties, one of the most serious tasks was to create System and Database backups. The task, of course, was responsible but not so difficult. Chip had no problems with his responsibility. His fussy nature allowed him to keep in mind many things at once. But that’s not for sure.

    He had to back up system data from the online store every month and back up the customers' contacts every week. Since Chip was fussy, he decided that backups every day will be just fine. He doesn't need much time to click several buttons, and he believed in case of some problems, he'll become a hero. Well, also, just in case, he decided never to delete previous versions of backups. If someone needs to find an old version of the site, he'll become a hero again.

    There were many new customers in October, and it was not a surprise. Parents weren't saving on tailoring the best Halloween costumes for their children, so the business went up. Over the past two weeks, sales revenue has almost doubled.

    Murphy's Law showed its effect the night before Halloween when almost all the customers’ contacts base disappeared due to new implemented features with some unexpected bugs. So, when time came to restore the previous saved customer base, the backups turned out to be in chaos. There were daily copies of system data, but the last created and full backup of the customers' contacts was for September! Fussy Chip has never waited for the end of the backup process and has never checked its accuracy. The database with many new buyers was lost.

Don't worry about Chip's fate, even though he looks like an entirely fictional character, but what can this story teach? It's simple: Never! Never push somebody to choose coffee in a hurry %)

  1. Check your backups and test its correctness.
  2. Avoid the confusion with backups by automatization for creating these backups.
  3. Adjust the frequency of creating different backups, and you will know what day and time it happens.
  4. Configure the deletion of obsolete copies.

All the above steps except testing can be provided by our Backup to Dropbox module for Magento 2. With it, you can set the frequency and time of creating and deleting old and outdated backups. All work will be processed automatically according to your configuration.

Well? Aren't you still scared?

Then we present you the last key function of the Backup to Dropbox module for Magento 2. The module will always send a notification about the start of the backup to the email you specified if you want. Now you can come up with a terrible story that could happen without such messages and make your own Halloween scary tale.

Although all the stories are fictional and any coincidences with reality are unintentional. However, we advise you to think again about the security of your online store. After all, “Stephen” and “Chip” shared their failures for a reason;)

Have a safe but frightful Halloween!