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In an ideal world: You have a disaster recovery plan you have written down in advance, and which you have tested thoroughly on both staging and live infrastructure. When you get hacked you don't panic. You go to your site's backend and check which backups are taken before doing anything else. You make sure all these backups are downloaded and copied to a flash drive. Then you start acting.

In the real world: Poop hits the fan, making everyone and everything look like a rather fecal interpretation of a Jackson Pollock painting. Still, you need to make sure you have a copy of your backups. No backups = bad times. This is the one bit I can't help with.

Now, restoring a site does NOT delete backup archive files by default. You'd have to explicitly select the option to delete files on the server for that to happen – which is strategically placed as far away from the green start button as possible, giving you more than an ohnosecond to realize what you're doing, stop, and finally download those blasted backups before continuing. I don't suppose you are stupid. I suppose we all are stupid under stress. It's not the same.

What will get overwritten, of course, is the contents of the #__akeebabackup_backups table during restoration. However, I do give you the option to tell the Akeeba Backup Restoration Script which tables to restore in the database restoration page (right hand side). By extension, you can select all tables except for the #__akeebabackup_backups table.

Further to that, remember how I told you that you should download those backup archives? If you have the backup archives locally, you can extract them. Either use a local web server to run Kickstart, or run it through the command line. You can now inspect the contents of each extracted backup archive. Once you find the clean backup, copy it to a new flash drive, put it in an envelope, seal it, and put it in your drawer. Delete all files on your site, upload the clean backup and Kickstart, do the restoration. Oh, oops, you messed that up, eh? It happens. No problem. Delete all files from the site, retrieve the sealed envelope from your desk muttering to your yourself about bleeping [unprintable] muppet, get the flash drive, upload the correct backup this time, do the restoration. Sounds about right? :)

And for the bewildered people reading this public ticket and wondering why I have it out for Eoin. Chill out, I know Eoin. We have the same deviant sense of humour. The core of the instructions holds true. The humourous parts are just a bit of fun to lighten the mood.