Well, the time has come to restore a Joomla website. Lucky for me it was my site that needed to be restored.
"You're only as good as your last backup."
I was able to restore my site from a full backup I took over the weekend. It took less time than I thought it would and was easier also. After the restore the site was intact. I found the issue to be an un-updated extension. Which caused a problem with the administration side that was broken.
The application I used to recover my site was, AkeebaBackup, the same one I use on every maintenance plan. This extension has been around for 10 years and has a strong team of coders and support behind it. It is very comforting to know it works and is straightforward to execute.
Kudos to Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos and his team for producing the most important extension you can add to a Joomla website.
With that being said, I cannot stress the importance of regular backups and testing the backup to ensure a site can be recovered. There have been a few instances when I needed to restore a website but, knowing the backups are safely stored in the cloud and are readily accessible makes the process go smoothly.
My backup philosophy is to backup based on the frequency of updates. Since Joomla releases updates are fairly consistent I run a massive backup on all sites the day before to preserve a working site just in case.
So if you are one of the clients and have a maintenance plan your website is in good hands.
