For years, I backed up every site on Magic Pages the same way. Every night, make a complete copy. The whole site, zipped up and sent off to safe storage. Then do it again tomorrow. And the day after.
It worked. It was also, I finally realised, a bit like photocopying an entire book every night because I'd added one new sentence.
Because here's the thing about a blog: it barely changes from one day to the next. You publish a post. Maybe swap out an image. But almost all of it is exactly the same as it was yesterday. And every night, I was dutifully copying all of it again – the identical parts included. For this very blog that's about 300 MB of mostly the same files, packed up and stored fresh, every single day.
That copy isn't free. Storage costs money. And that's where it gets a little embarrassing.
Deleting my own history to save money
Storing a full copy every day, forever, gets expensive fast. So you don't. You keep the last week or so, then you start letting go – one copy a week for a while, then one a month, then nothing, at some point.
So yeah, I was paying to store near-identical copies of every blog on Magic Pages, and throwing away most of its history to keep the bill down. The worst of both worlds. Paying more than I should, and getting less than I wanted.
I did it for over three years without really questioning it, because it worked. And that's usually the trap when you build things over a longer period of time. The wasteful thing and the working thing were the same thing.
So I stopped copying
A few weeks ago I moved this blog onto a different backup method – an open-source one called restic – with one clever idea behind it. Instead of copying the whole site every night, it only stores what actually changed. The first backup is a full copy. After that, each night just records the difference: a new post, a new image, etc.
The effect is well...kinda awkward, looking back. Twelve days of backups for this blog, the old way, would take about 3.7 GB. The new way: 266 MB. I have the same amount of restore points but at a fraction of the space. Across this blog and the main Magic Pages site together, it's roughly 10 GB vs. 820 MB.
But there's more to it
I don't have to ration the backup history anymore.
When every day of history costs a full copy, you're forced to throw days away. When a day costs almost nothing, you just... keep them. All of them. Months of daily restore points, for less than a single copy used to cost. The thing I'd treated as an unavoidable trade-off for years – more history means a bigger bill – quietly stopped being true.
That flipped the whole question. It's not "how few backups can I get away with keeping?" anymore. It's "why would I ever delete one, if it literally doesn't cost me anything?"
Where else am I doing this?
That's the thought that stuck with me. Where else am I paying, over and over, to store or move or handle something that hasn't actually changed?
It's an easy blind spot, precisely because the old way works. Nothing breaks. No alarm goes off. It's just quietly wasteful in a way you stop noticing after a few months – until you look straight at it and feel a bit stupid.
For now, this is still an experiment. It runs on exactly two sites – this blog and the Magic Pages website – the guinea pigs, as always 🙃
A few weeks in it's behaving beautifully, but two sites isn't 1,400, so I'll roll it out slowly and carefully. Thankfully, past me implemented a feature-flag system which lets me roll out any feature gradually.
But just to get it crystal clear: if you're a Magic Pages customer, nothing changes for you. When it does, the only thing you'll notice is a good thing: there will be more backups, potentially going back years. Same price for you, but a bigger safety net.