It is well documented in the Webflow community that deleting a project means that it is gone forever and there is no way to physically back up a project onto your own computer by downloading it as a zip file etc.
I have a question about backups for enterprise customers.
Is Webflow considering implementing a system that would allow for enterprise customers to recover a project that has been accidentally deleted?
Enterprise customers may have several people logging into their website admin accounts and it would be unimaginable for a large company to find that it’s corporate presence had been accidentally deleted. I believe many large corporations would never allow themselves to be put in a situation where their accidentally or maliciously deleted website project was completely unrecoverable.
For many large organizations the lack of ability to recover an accidentally deleted website project would be an instant deal breaker as far as adopting a new technology is concerned.
Is the ability for enterprise customers to recover deleted projects something that Webflow is considering in the near or long-term future?
I totally agree that this is an issue! We’ve been through this with a smaller charity client – not that the website was deleted, but thinking through the issue.
We came to the conclusion that accidental deletion is very unlikely, but that an additional, realistic risk is malicious deletion by someone who’s got access to it. This could be a disgruntled employee, anyone wanting to take revenge on whomever in the company or the company itself, or a person wanting to pay a trick. There would not even be a way of finding out who was logged in at a certain time…
Absolutely: Webflow SHOULD provide a solution where a deleted website can be restored! No matter how small the chances are of it happening, but the risk us real, and indeed IT IS an unthinkable scenario.
In any case, of our charity client, they’ve put a lot of work into the content they have, and there is nothing for them to go back to if the site was deleted. While Webflow doesn’t have a solution for it, the system we’ve arrived at is this:
In addition to their hosting fees, every couple of months or so they take out a paid Account Plan with Webflow and duplicate the site, which is then transferred into a separate free Webflow account where it sits as a backup. That would not be the latest version of the site most of the time, but a good enough fallback for disaster scenario.
@britishchap please do add this to the WF wishlist (or check whether this request exists) – WF should definitely provide some functionality that covers this.
Actually, I think it should have some measure to avoid this for any Team account.
I also addressed some serious security and permissions issues in another post, but it looks like there are not many responses to this. Webflow staff probably does not take it as well.
Sadly, when I tried to talk with support and even Enterprise team about this, it sounds like this is not something they are paying attention to.