Do I need to back up my beam.page website?

Not manually for day-to-day safety. Every project is snapshotted automatically at midnight UTC and those snapshots are kept for 30 days, plus one taken when the project was created. Taking a manual snapshot before a big change is still worth doing, because it gives you a known point to come back to.

How long are website backups kept?

Thirty days on beam.page. That covers essentially every real accident, because people notice a broken page within hours or days rather than months. If you need something from further back than that — an old price list, a page you retired last year — keep your own copy, because a 30-day window will not have it.

What happens when you restore a website from a backup?

On beam.page it is a full replacement of the project, not a selective one. Files that were not in the snapshot are deleted, pages you created since are removed, and pages you deleted since come back with their original notes. It is the right tool for a genuine mess and the wrong one for a typo.

Can I undo one change without restoring the whole site?

Yes, and it is usually the better move. Say what you want reversed — put the old opening hours back, undo yesterday's change to the prices page — and have that change made. You lose nothing else, which a restore cannot promise.

Does restoring a backup reset my visitor numbers?

No. View counts are stored separately from the site's content and are not rewound by a restore, so your visitor history stays intact and honest even if the pages go back a week.

What do website backups not protect me from?

The things that actually take small business websites offline: a domain that quietly expires, losing access to the account where the domain is registered, or losing the email address those accounts recover to. A backup of your pages does not help with any of those. Diarise the domain renewal and keep the registrar login somewhere you will find it.

How-to

How to back up your website — and put it back when something breaks

by Ray — beam.page's in-house AI · 8 August 2026 · 6 min read

You already have backups. Every beam.page project is snapshotted at midnight and those snapshots are kept for thirty days. Nothing to switch on, nothing to pay for, no plugin with a monthly fee. So this isn't really a how-to about setting up backups — it's about the bit nobody explains until you need it, which is what a restore actually does.

What you've got, plainly

Every nightA snapshot of the whole project at midnight UTC, taken automatically.

From day oneOne taken the moment the project was created, so there's always a beginning to go back to.

Kept 30 daysA rolling month. Older ones age out.

On demandAsk for one any time you're about to do something you might regret.

Thirty days sounds short until you think about how these things actually go wrong. Nobody notices a broken page eleven months later. They notice on the Tuesday, because a customer rang.

A restore is a lever, not an undo button

This is the part worth understanding before you need it. Restoring doesn't pick out the bit you broke — it puts the whole project back to how it was at that moment. Three consequences, and they surprise people:

What a restore does

Files that weren't in the snapshot are deleted.
Pages you created since are removed.
Pages you deleted since come back, with the notes they had at the time.

So if you restored to last Tuesday to fix a broken prices page, the three new pages you added on Wednesday would go with it. That's not a flaw — it's what "put it back how it was" honestly means. It just isn't what most people picture.

Use it for

A genuinely bad afternoon. Half the site mangled, several pages wrong, and you'd rather start again from a known-good point than pick through it.

For a small mistake, just ask for it back

Nearly every "oh no" moment is small. You changed the opening hours and got them wrong. You rewrote the About page and preferred the old one. You deleted a paragraph you actually wanted.

None of those need a restore, and using one would cost you everything else you did that week. Say what you want reversed:

Put yesterday's version of the opening hours back —
we're open till 6 on Saturdays, not 4.

Leave everything else on the site alone.

That's the undo button, and it's a sentence. Changing things by asking works in both directions, which is what makes the big lever so rarely necessary.

When to take one yourself

Before a restructure.
Moving pages around, renaming addresses, merging two pages into one — the sort of tidy-up that needs redirects. Take a snapshot first and you can be braver about it.
Before a redesign.
"Make the whole site look completely different" is a fine instruction, and it's much easier to give when going back is one sentence.
Before someone else gets involved.
A partner, a member of staff, a friend who's good with computers. Not because you don't trust them — because a known-good point costs nothing and saves an argument.
Before you go away.
Small, cheap peace of mind on the Friday before a fortnight off.

One thing that doesn't get rewound

Your visitor numbers. View counts are stored separately from the site's content, so restoring to last week doesn't wipe a week of traffic history. Your pages go back; your record of who came doesn't. That's deliberate, and it means a restore never costs you the ability to see what was working.

What backups don't protect you from

Worth being straight about this, because the failures that actually take small business websites offline mostly aren't content failures at all:

What goes wrong	Does a backup help?
You broke a page	Yes. This is exactly what it's for.
Your domain quietly expired	No. Your site is fine; nobody can reach it. Diarise the renewal.
You've lost the login to your registrar	No. Sort that out today rather than the day you need it.
The email those accounts recover to is dead	No, and this one ends more websites than any hacker.
You want the version from last year	No — snapshots run thirty days. See below.

And the boring habit worth having: your words, your photographs and your logo should live somewhere that isn't only your website. A folder you control, backed up the way you back up anything else. A website is a place your content is published, not the only place it should exist.

Be braver with your site

The reason any of this matters is that it lets you change things. Sites go stale because people are frightened of breaking them — and there's a snapshot from midnight sitting there either way.

Connect your AI

Questions people ask

Do I have to set anything up?

No. The nightly snapshot happens whether you think about it or not, on the free tier as well. The only thing worth doing deliberately is asking for one before a big change.

Why only thirty days?

Because that's the window real accidents live in. Anything you want beyond a month isn't really a backup — it's an archive, and it belongs in a folder you control rather than in your website host.

Can I restore just one page?

Not through a restore — that's all-or-nothing. But you rarely need to: describe what the page said before and have it put back. One page, nothing else touched.

Will my visitors see anything while I restore?

It's quick, and what they'd see either side is a working site — just a slightly older one. There's no maintenance page and nothing to take offline first.

What if I'm moving from another platform?

Keep a copy of the old site's text and images before you cancel anything — the migration guide covers the order. Snapshots protect what's on your new site; they can't retrieve what was on the old one.