What a weekly hosting backup can restore, and what it cannot
A weekly hosting backup can put your website back as it was when the last backup ran: its files and its databases. It cannot bring back anything that changed after that, so up to a week of orders, posts, form entries and uploads may be missing from a restore. On Noiz shared hosting, the weekly backup is taken by the control panel and kept off site, as a safety net for your website. For anything that changes daily, add your own backups as well, with Plesk, Softaculous or a WordPress plugin, and keep at least one copy away from the server.
What "weekly" means for a restore
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) calls the point in time you can recover to the recovery point. With one backup every seven days, your recovery point can be up to a week old.
Two examples show what that means:
- A brochure site that changes once a month loses nothing if it is restored from last week's backup.
- An online shop restored from a backup taken five days ago loses five days of orders, customer accounts and stock changes, which then have to be found and re-entered.
How often you need a backup depends on how much change you can afford to lose.
What Noiz's weekly backup covers
Every Noiz shared hosting plan includes a weekly backup, taken by the Plesk panel and stored off site, so it survives a problem with the server itself.
| What the weekly plan backup is for | Keep your own copy of |
|---|---|
| Website files: code, themes, plugins, images and uploads | Anything you cannot afford to lose, including your mail and other important data |
| Databases | Changes made since the last weekly backup: your own more frequent backups |
The weekly backup is a safety net for the site, so keep your own copy of your mail and other important data. The Email Security add-on includes email backup for a domain hosted with Noiz, which plan backups do not cover.
If you need a restore from the weekly backup, open a ticket.
Backups you can set up yourself
The weekly backup is a safety net. For a site that changes often, add backups on your own schedule. There are three common ways, and you can combine them.
Plesk backups
Plesk, the control panel on every Noiz shared plan, can back up your subscription's websites, databases and mail on a schedule you set, as full backups or as incremental backups that store only what changed. You can restore a single site, file or database from a backup without overwriting everything else.
Plesk can store backups on a remote server over FTP or FTPS, or over SFTP, and with extensions in cloud storage. A backup can be protected with a password. Plesk warns that an incremental backup is useless if the full backup it depends on is deleted or damaged, so keep the full backups too.
Our help centre covers each step:
- Plesk backup overview
- How to generate a full backup in Plesk
- Remote backups over SFTP, over FTP(S) and to Dropbox
- How to password-protect a backup in Plesk
Backups stored inside your hosting account count against your disk, and they sit on the same server as the site. A remote location is safer.
Softaculous backups
If you installed an application with Softaculous, the one-click installer in Plesk, it can back up that installation and restore it from its Backups and Restore screen. Softaculous supports automatic backups once a day, once a week or once a month, with a rotation setting that decides how many to keep, and backup locations away from the server. By default its backups are stored in your own account, on the same server. Our guide explains what Softaculous is.
WordPress backup plugins
Several well-known WordPress plugins back up your site from inside WordPress:
| Plugin | Free version backs up | Free version stores to |
|---|---|---|
| UpdraftPlus | Files and database, on a schedule from every two hours to monthly, with restore | Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 and compatible storage, FTP, email and others |
| BackWPup | The full database and all files, hourly to monthly | The web server, Dropbox, FTP, Amazon S3 and compatible storage, and others |
| Duplicator | Files and database as one package, for moving or restoring a site | A download you keep; scheduled backups and cloud storage are in its paid version |
Each plugin's free version differs in what it restores. BackWPup's free version, for example, restores only backups you upload by hand. Check before you rely on one.
Rules that make any backup useful
- Keep three copies on two kinds of storage, one away from the site. That is the 3-2-1 rule, from a paper published by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
- Keep at least one copy offline or out of reach. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) points out that ransomware which reaches your site can also reach backups stored beside it.
- Encrypt backups that leave the server. CISA's ransomware guide calls for offline, encrypted backups of critical data.
- Test a restore. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. Both CISA and the NCSC say to test backups regularly.
When you want Noiz to handle it
- WordPress Care takes a restore point before every change it makes, and restores from the most recent usable backup if the site is hacked or breaks. See WordPress Care.
- Email Security adds email backup for a domain hosted with Noiz, which plan backups do not cover.
- Backup is sold in the security store.
Ask us what your site needs
Tell us what your site does and how often it changes, and we will suggest a backup schedule that fits. Open a ticket.
Sources
Checked 19 October 2026.
Definitions and guidance
- NIST glossary: recovery point objective
- CISA: Data Backup Options (the 3-2-1 rule)
- CISA: #StopRansomware Guide
- NCSC: offline backups in an online world
Tools
- Plesk Obsidian: managing backups
- Plesk Obsidian: scheduling backups
- Plesk Obsidian: configuring remote storage
- Softaculous: automated backups
- Softaculous: backup on a remote server
- UpdraftPlus
- BackWPup
- Duplicator
Noiz
- Shared hosting
- Security add-ons: Email Security and Backup
- WordPress Care
- Noiz help centre: the Plesk and Softaculous guides linked in the article, at docs.noiz.ie
Note: while some of this content was produced with the help of AI, the final editing has been done by a real human being.
