Can I backup my site?

I’ve successful built a site that I’m really pleased with in Squarespace. All good, and am about to pull the trigger on a subscription.

However, I’m very concerned that there appears to be no way of backing up the site, and information on backups seems to be really sketchy.

I’d really appreciate some info here, grateful for any pointers.

Thanks
Mike

There are two reasons I can think of someone might want to backup their site:

1. To maintain the freedom to switch platforms.

You own your data on Squarespace and you can export it at any time. Just go to the Import / Export area of the config and you'll see a button like the one in the top right of this image. This keeps a backup of your data, not the site as a whole.

2. To restore the site if you ever need to.

You don't have to worry about backing up your site for this reason.

I think a good analogy for non-managed hosts vs. Squarespace is the difference between a desktop computer and something like, say, Google Drive or Dropbox. With the former you are in charge of updates, backups, and other systems tasks. With the latter those things are taken care of for you.

Squarespace is a managed service and, like Dropbox or Google Drive, we don't want our customers to have to worry about backing up their sites, updating software, or any other tasks that are better handled by an engineer.

Hey Kevin,

Thanks, yeah, this analogy makes perfect sense. I'm less concerned about exporting content (I have local copies of everything, after all), more, 'what do I do if my site isn't there one day?' or 'what do I do if I'm dumb enough to wipe a page' - that sort of thing.

The export feature is a good thing though, I'm off to try it out.

Thanks for responding.

Mike

We also just rolled out something like a "Trash" folder. If you accidentally delete a page, it will still be there for you to recover.

One other reason someone might want a backup:They're working as part of a team, and they're worried that another team member might accidentally bend, spindle, or otherwise mutilate the site. Being able to roll the site back to the most recent non-uglified version would save a lot of hassle. On Weebly, you just make a duplicate site. Easy easy. Is there an easy way to do this on SquareSpace?

I'm with Smilez on this. My clients want to be able to restore pages, widget content, etc. if they're broken, not just deleted. As of now all I can tell them is to keep text file backups of the code for every page, every widget. For me, as a developer, I don't have a huge problem doing that, but for my clients, especially when it's a whole team of content creators and editors, that's kind of hard to keep track of and make a routine for.

Just so everyone is clear. Squarespace can not recover your data for you. I have been in the situation where the dropbox module made a mess of all my pages (changing titles and rearranging them). I asked squarespace support to recover the data and they couldn't.

Hardly premium service.

While what foleyatwork posted might be a nice theory, there is no way to revert to saved on things like your style edits. The only thing sqsp allows you to export is the content, not the formatting. Of you do lose your formatting, they can't/won't do anything to help you get it back and you have to start over from scratch. Be very wary of hitting the reset button on your style editor, and if you do make changes to a page make sure you save after every single one.

This makes it almost impossible to work with a team of contributors/editors and makes squarespace a really difficult platform.

That export is WordPress specific, but doesn’t map folders to WordPress site hierarchy. So I don’t find a 1-platform that doesn’t work portable.

I NEED SITE BACKUPS!!!! Version Control! Multiple Undos! Something!!!! With multiple editors there must be a version control function with backups. It is too easy to mess up content and styling within a page. To not have any of these features in place, besides being so y2k, makes me terrified to hand my nicely built and styled website over to the clients. This seems like such a critical function I just can't believe it hasn't been integrated yet.

Yes I want to try a new Template. The preview doesn't show me much. So I have to implement it. However I have put a lot of work in customizing my current site and don't want to lose all this work if I don't like the new template...

Can the support team return my site exactly like I had it before????

Squarespace should keep at least one archive backup of your website that you can restore and with all content, at least if not monthly – biweekly for up to 2 months.

That way you can revert to a previous version if you need.

I don’t see why they cannot do this.

I'm in agreement with these other fine users- there needs to be some kind of revision-history/version control built in to roll back site changes. Even something as simple as keeping server-side "snapshots" that we can restore from, that are the code files that Keith mentions. A lot of content people don't have the chops to know how to use those, so it's better for the customer to just have a button that lists snapshots with a "roll-back styles" and "roll-back all" option, so that you can revert design/layout/template changes easily, and you can also revert everything including the data.

Then before it actually executes on the action of doing so, it saves the site as-is so that if rolling-back was a bad idea then rolling-forward can also happen.

Is that a reasonable request Squarespace?

I went through this for a good two months back and forth with Squarespace.

Not having the ability to backup has many people deciding not to make the move.

I agree with the 2 points but you forget about human error. That happens more then anything else. Also there isn’t enough access levels to really work in teams. Even something like having multiple bloggers. You have to give them all read and write access to everyones articles. So now your worried if they delete someone else’s article.

SO HUMAN error is a huge reason for backups.

Also the WordPress export is almost useless if you ask me. They don’t save and export images, rather just links to images. So you need your Squarespace site live for the move to WordPress.

I went from WordPress to Squarespace because I didn’t want to deal with the management any longer – but I’ve found many other hurtles because of the walled garden.

All that being said the good has out weighed the bad once we’ve gotten everything at lifewithtech squared away is great.

You can try HTTrack to at least copy structure/content so it's there. Recovery from that offline mirror will not be possible but some piece of mind to safe the content.

As many have said, there is actually a third reason... But, on top of that, your reasoning for "not worrying" about the second reason is terrible. Backing up anything other than videos can never be enough. The more redundancy, the better! You really should add a true backup strategy for that alone.

And unlike dropbox or google drive, you don't offer a way to sync files to our end (though gDrive also has issues in this respect).

I agree with everyone here as well.

Either Squarespace needs to make:

• User permission levels that allow editors to create and edit their own posts, but but prevent them from deleting or editing other contributor posts
• An optional setting like, “only site admin can delete published posts”
• Or they need to allow site admins to restore and control backups

I originally came to Squarespace to make a site with multiple contributors more easy to maintain.

After I discovered that anyone with access to create a post also has access to delete all of my site’s content, I have been forced to maintain all of the content myself. Moving to Squarespace has actually increased my workload. What’s more, Squarespace assured me that they were trying to develop a user permission level that prevented accidental deletions, but they’ve never done so. Speaking as a software developer, I doubt this is a difficult task.

C’mon, Squarespace, are you listening? You’ll never be a professional platform if site admins are afraid of accidental post/page deletions. Imagine if a disgruntled employee–perhaps an admin assistant–decides to delete your website. With Squarespace, they can! Scary!

-Thomas

Hey guys. I'm just coming to this same idea about backing up our websites and then found this thread. Have we found a way to backup our site and to have the option to "load last backup"? These can come in handy quite often.

Thanks

Slightly related, exporting to wordpress is the second best backup solution you can have right now, while being the only one that will allow for importing later: http://answers.squarespace.com/questions/19617/can-we-duplicate-an-existing-site-on-squarespace/73710

Last week an employee maliciously deleted a substantial amount of content from our site (individual items rather than pages). We are frustrated and disappointed to find that Squarespace doesn't provide any backup facility. We've loved using Squarespace but the website is due for an overhaul in the next few months and the inability to back up content is likely to push us towards finding another solution.

September 2020 here, and there is still no way to access snapshots of our squarespace content in case of human error. If me, my boss, my intern, anyone screws something up or gets misinformed, we are catastrophically screwed.

You can make it as difficult and evil as you'd like for us to migrate our data -out- of squarespace, BUT LET US HAVE BACKUP SNAPSHOTS WITHIN SQUARESPACE. This is web safety 101.

I can't pay for a service into which I pour years of work knowing that it can all die irreversibly due to any human error at any time.

Please forward this to whomever has decision making power and sense at Squarespace.

Hi everyone,

Could this be an easy fix for basically having snapshots of your of site, in case you or someone on your team deletes what they shouldn't? https://archive.org/web/

It's called Wayback Machine.

It periodically saves images of URLs across the internet so you can refer back to them any time you want.

There is also an ability to have them save the exact URL you want now, as long as your site allows crawlers.

May at least be good to throw the URL of really important pages in there every now and then.

Just a thought.

Thanks,
mhamm

The only way is duplicate your site..

I accidentally deleted a section from our website.   We paid someone to build the site, and we're happy with our content.  I needed to make a simple update, and in the confusion of how to use the squarespace editing tools, I accidentally deleted something and could not get it back.

We are moving our company website to another host due to this gap.  time to start researching our options.

imo this web host is fine for personal use, but I would never recommend any business use this... due to the lack of backups