Backup Your Data
Backing up your data is so important. The world of computers is dangerous and bad things do happen. Yesterday, my computer had to be reformatted and because I had a data backup on hand I lost virtually zero time getting the computer back up and running (compared to what I would have had to spend trying to recover that data).
Let’s take that principal of backing up your computers data (documents, pictures, spreadsheets, etc) and apply it to websites. Websites are hosted on servers. Servers are pieces of hardware to, and can crash or have problems. It is one thing if your server is down and your website won’t load but imagine if it went down and you lost your website data!
Hosts usually make auto backups, but those can be corrupted. So in a whole string of bad events, you could loose all the work you’ve done on your website in one fell swoop. It has been known to happen!
So, what can you do to prevent this? It really is simple and takes almost no time. Backup, and backup often. Most web hosts can generate a full data backup for you automatically (in the control panel). This can be downloaded to a local computer. What this does is it allows a full restore of your website and data to the date when you downloaded the backup.
Some hosts allow you to schedule automatic backups which can then be emailed to you, allowing you to not have to worry about remembering. Imagine if a website you’ve been working on for years crashed and then couldn’t be recovered. You’d be crushed, so backup your data!
There are certain things you can buy to give you a failsafe net for your data. That being said, I do it a free and simple way.
I backup fairly frequently (1 to 2 times a week) and keep 3 copies. I keep one locally on my computer, 1 on an external drive (USB key) and one on a backup drive (that is used just for that purpose). This allows me 3 chances to recover my data. I do this incase one set of data becomes corrupted.
A lot of people think this can never happen to them (loose a website). Wouldn’t you rather be prepared and not loose it if it happens than run the risk. It is better to be safe than sorry. Just because you think it can never happen to you doesn’t mean it won’t!
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What an important post. I have been crushed by hard drive dying on me in the past… You said it perfectly…Imagine if a website you’ve been working on for years crashed and then couldn’t be recovered. You can’t put a value on something like that.
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I also backup my files and database regularly just in case….
Rajaie AlKoranis last blog post..5 Good Reasons Social Media Traffic Isn’t Useless
I back up at least twice a day without fail.
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So true… having a backup is really a must - as it will save your day especially during lose of data or virus attack.
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I gotta start backing up more often but I do backup!!! However not that often for online stuff. I recently lost a wordpress blog (accidentally overwrote the database) and ended up losing a bunch of posts.
I agree Max, backup is important. I use the wp database plugin, to do automatic backups of that. I need to schedule backups of the site itself, as well as export all my wordpress data to an xml file so I have all comments, posts, categories, pages, links, and stuff like that.
You would think that the webhost would be on top of it, and have your data backup replicated to one or multiple other locations. But, hardware fails, I know this all to well….
great post
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I learned the hard way I needed to keep backups. A few years ago, my website hosting company (herwebhost), dropped off the face of the earth and I lost all of my websites. I had no back-up’s and had to start over with 10 websites.
I contacted EV1, which is where the company was renting servers from and they told me that Her WEb Host had been warned several times about hosting “adult” websites, so when they caught them again, they shut the entire server down.
There were 1000’s of us who lost everything we had worked so hard for.
I was angry at them for not giving any warning and I was very angry at myself for trusting my web host to keep a copy.
I know many back-ups like crazy, so I never have to deal with that again!
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