How long does the first backup take?

The first full backup starts within a couple of minutes of checkout and usually finishes in five to fifteen minutes, depending on how many pages your site has. The private link arrives by email.

Right after checkout, the page you land on says the first backup is on its way and updates by itself. Behind the scenes a worker starts within a couple of minutes, reads your sitemap, follows links between your public pages, renders each page in a real browser for a full-page screenshot, copies the images, styles, and fonts, and stores the zip.

A ten-page site is usually done in about five minutes. A site with a few hundred pages takes fifteen minutes or more, and a site with a thousand pages can take over an hour, because every page gets a full-page screenshot. Very large sites are also crawled more gently, so their host does not push back.

When it is done you get an email with the private link, and the landing page changes to show the backup. If the page has been waiting for more than about fifteen minutes, something is off on our side; write to hello@deadsimplebackups.com and a person will look.