The Server That Was Wiped

An online store sold through eBay and shipped through multiple carriers. Orders flowed in, parcels flowed out, and for years nothing went wrong. That was the problem.

The store ran on a server the owner managed themselves, and on Magento 1, software retired in June 2020. Nobody updated the server. Nobody updated the software. It just worked, so it was left alone.

Then one day it didn’t. The site was gone, the eBay link was dead, and the shipping integrations were silent. The attackers hadn’t just defaced the site. They’d gained root access to the server and wiped it.

“No problem,” the owner said. “We have backups.”

The hosting company’s automated backups had been failing since the day they were set up. Nobody had ever checked. There was no single clean copy to restore.

So we rebuilt it the hard way. We pulled data from 10 different backups, partial exports and old copies, and put the store back together piece by piece: products, customers, orders, then every integration, one at a time. It took 5 days, and the business lost days of sales along the way.

The store is back, on a patched, monitored, properly backed-up setup.

Everything worked until the day it didn’t, and by then it was too late to start. Have someone manage your server and your site.

“Not sure your backups actually work? Ask us to test one.”