Have you ever accidentally deleted a file or folder on your computer? More than likely I’d bet. Fortunately, you’re saved by the fact that computers have Recycle bins. Web servers: not so much. If you delete something, it’s gone.
If you get into the groove of doing work on your server, you can quite easily delete your backups without even thinking, by forgetting that they’re contained within a particular folder that seems innocent enough to delete.
This is where off-site backups come in. Aside from not putting all of your eggs in one basket (one point of failure), having a write-only off-site location where you’re sending your backups enables you to rest in the knowledge that there’s always a recent copy of your site away from where you would ever be messing around with files.
Here at The WP Butler, we make regular backups of your entire site, and we save them on your server and then also send them to an off-site Amazon S3 bucket, where they can reside safely for retrieval if the worst should ever happen. Or, even if you just made a mistake and need to roll back to a previous version of your site.
If you’re not currently backing up off-site, you might want to either figure out a solution for doing so, or hire a service like The WP Butler that will do it for you.