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    Peak season 2026 · part 3 of 4: Built to last

    Everyone has backups. Almost nobody has tested a restore

    On the busiest Friday of the year the question is not whether a backup exists

    By Simon Bumford, Founder of EveryHost••6 min read

    TL;DR

    Ask your host to restore your store to staging and tell you how long it took. Nearly every merchant has backups. Very few have ever restored one and timed it. The number matters, because in November the question is not whether a backup exists, it is whether you are down for twenty minutes or six hours.

    This is part of the Magento Black Friday readiness checklist. Black Friday 2026 is 27 November. If you want to change anything structural, the deadline that binds is 2 October.

    The question that tells you everything

    Ask your host: if the store were unrecoverable at seven on Black Friday evening, how long until it is serving orders again, and when did you last prove that number?

    How comfortably they answer tells you more about your hosting than any specification sheet. A good answer is a number and a date. A vague answer is also an answer.

    The failure mode nobody plans for is not the backup missing. It is the backup existing, and taking nine hours to restore, on the one night of the year when nine hours is the whole event.

    What to actually check

    Restore to staging and time it. Write the number down. Repeat it after any significant change to catalogue size.

    Confirm backups are off-site. A backup on the same server as the store is not a backup, it is a copy waiting to share the same fate.

    Check the backup includes what you think it does: database, media, and app/etc/env.php. A database-only backup will not bring a store back on its own.

    Confirm you can roll a deployment back, and that somebody has actually done it rather than assuming the button works.

    Staging that resembles production

    A staging environment on a different PHP version, without the extensions, or with a six month old database, will not catch the thing that breaks you.

    It should match production closely enough that a payment method behaving differently there means something.

    If you do not have one, this is the single best thing to build before the freeze. It is also the thing that makes a code freeze survivable, because it gives you somewhere to prove an emergency fix before it goes live.

    The human part

    Write down who to call at nine on a Friday night in November, and test the number now rather than then. An out of hours process that has never been used is a hypothesis.

    Agree in advance what you switch off if the site is struggling: live chat, review widgets, personalisation, non-essential third party scripts. Decide it while you are calm.

    Make sure more than one person can do the critical things. Peak weekends have a habit of coinciding with someone being on a plane.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Frequently enough that the data you would lose between backups is data you can afford to lose. For most stores that means at least daily, and during peak trading four hourly or better, because a day of Black Friday orders is not a rounding error. The frequency matters less than the restore time, which is the number almost nobody knows.

    It depends almost entirely on catalogue and media size, and on whether the backup is on the same network as the server. For a mid-sized Magento store a good answer is under an hour. If your host cannot give you a number at all, that is the finding, and it is worth acting on before November rather than after.

    Yes, they solve different problems. A backup gets you back to where you were. Staging stops you needing to. During a code freeze staging is what lets you ship an emergency security fix with any confidence, because you can prove it does not break checkout before it reaches customers.

    Who to call and on what number, what you switch off first if the site is struggling, how to roll back a deploy, how long a restore takes, and who has the authority to make the call at eight on a Friday night. One page. If it runs to ten pages nobody will read it at the moment it is needed.

    Free Peak Readiness Check

    We will review what is externally visible about your store's resilience, and tell you the questions worth putting to your current host. Free, and you do not need to be a customer.

    Back to the full checklist.