Where Is Your Backup?

Probably the most over looked and most important aspects of building and maintaining a website is making sure the work that is done is never lost.  You  probably heard it time and again…back up, backup, backup.  And most people’s answer is later, later, later.

Let’s look at a scenario.  You spend hours, days, months, and maybe even years adding pages, designing, and redesigning your website, and you got your site the way you want it.  And then, it happens.  The day you thought would never happen.  Your hosting company gets attacked and it wipes out all the site files of your website.  So naturally you are irritated  about the situation but count on your host to have a backup.  But there is just one problem…they don’t have one.  So you lost everything.

So what’s the moral of the story?  Don’t neglect taking the time to make your own backups.  Don’t rely on your hosting company alone.  First, you don’t want to be in the situation I just described.  Secondly, they may charge you for keeping regular backups or possibly to restore a backup.  Thirdly, they might not have a full back of your site or it might be way outdated.  By making your own back ups, you have control over what gets saved and when it gets saved. So if you made a major change to your site…that would be a perfect time to do a backup.

Also you want to have 2 backups from different dates. Generally 2 weeks apart would be good. So just in case if the most recent backup isn’t usable you will have another to fall back on.  So it’s like having a backup for the back up.  This may seem redundant but if you have spent any kind of time or money on your website, don’t you think it will be well worth the time so you don’t have to start from scratch?

The backup schedule you keep is up to you and your needs.  If you make frequent changes then you might want to keep a fairly frequent backup schedule.  If you don’t then you can have a more flexible schedule.  How it is setup is up to you.  Maybe you coincide it with when you pay your monthly bills or every time you take out the trash.  The point is to be diciplined in keeping a backup schedule.

I have a favorite saying…”It’s better to have it and not need it, then to need it and not have it”.