As with any piece of software, WordPress is prone to get hacked or crashing when you expect it the least.
Better not leave it to luck :)
How?
By having a backup ready to reboot your website a moment before whatever brought your website down.
What to look for on a WordPress backup system
The system needs to be reliable
You don’t want something that seems to do the job on paper and fail miserably when you need it the most.
This part is easily verifiable through a quick Google search and checking users’ reviews of your chosen backup solution.
Cloud storage ready
It’s mandatory to have an option to upload the backup to cloud storage to prevent losing your WordPress due to hardware failure. Cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive are built to replicate storage, so you never lose your files.
It can be set to schedule automatic backups
Scheduling backups help get you the closest website version before it crashes. When done manually, website owners are unlikely to commit to setting the backup periodically and risk rebuilding their website using a much older version.
The frequency of the backup will depend on how often data changes on the website.
Quick to deploy when needed
Some basic backup scripts will manually zip the website files and dump your WordPress database. The restoring process can be tedious if you change hosts or your database is too large to be imported at once.
Thus, a one-click backup-and-deploy solution is better to avoid all the headaches related to manual backups.
Enough storage to fit your needs
When dealing with backup services (not plugins), you are likely to have a limit on how many archives you can store on their servers.
Ideally, the longer, the better. But you can settle for at least three months’ worth of backup.
Free vs. paid
I usually turn to paid plugins for critical functions, even if there is a free plugin counterpart.
Commercial products are more likely to fix issues and bugs, while the free ones can take time to get help from their developers and may sometimes be abandoned.
Here are a couple of options to get you started:
Don’t fully rely on a hosting services’ backup
Most hosting services now have a built-in backup system.
It can be a proprietary solution or an add-on to their hosting-managed tool (like Cpanel).
Since it’s part of the system, it’s usually reliable and does the job as intended in most cases. But even so, don’t let it be your sole backup option.
Always make sure to have an additional backup option that can store your backup file on the cloud.