Should I Backup my Website?
There's so much to think of and do when backing up your important business information. Many people naturally think to back up all the contents of their computer but backing up of websites is too often overlooked. Make sure you don't overlook this important step in backing up your business or you could fall victim to one or more of the following circumstances (and many of these actually happened).
1. While 'pruning' your message forum you accidentally delete a section you didn't mean to.
2. You've been with a web hosting company for years and they disappear without a trace.
3. Your web host is upgrading and as a result your site goes down for hours, and in some cases a day at a time. This happened to me!
4. You work with several people 'live' on a website. They accidentally overwrote your work and you didn't save a copy of the page.
5. You've upgraded software or scripts and it's not working so you need to get your site back to the way it was last night before the changes.
6. Your web host holds your site or domain captive. Pending your dispute, you need to setup your site all over again even in another place and domain.
7. Your website gets hacked and everything was deleted. I've experienced this. While not everything was deleted, it was a large enough chunk. Also, in those early days, I had just learned to edit websites live and had no copy on my hard drive.
8. Your web host just may keep backups, but there is no guarantee that these are going to be the ones you need at the time you need them. For example I was once managing a site that needed the database restored and we went to the web host for help. The host only had three databases and none were the one we needed so we had to opt for the oldest database, missing out on a few days of newer content we had on the site. If you do your own backups this doesn't have to happen.
9. While moving web hosts, due to a misunderstanding, the old account was canceled and deleted too early.
10. Your web host reviewed your site and decides you have violated their terms of service and shuts down your account in short notice.
11. You uploaded the wrong site or folder and overwrote the previous one. When using FTP this is pretty easy to do if you have a large list of sites to publish to and you're doing the updating when you're just a bit too tired.
12. You or someone reinstalled FrontPage extensions and now your redirects, error pages, fancy URL's and what not don't work anymore. You see, when you reinstall FrontPage extensions, it re-creates all your .htaccess files. That means, any customizations you had will also be lost.
13. You had custom programming done to your scripts. Your new web master upgraded the script and can't remember where or what all the modifications are. Worst, he/she doesn't know how to re-program those customizations.
14. A hacker inserted malicious code on all your website's pages and you need to rollback to the previous good version.
15. You've moved your website and blog over but while the blog files were transferred, the database was not. Now you can't get back into your old site to access the database.
It may seem like a large and daunting task but it really is your responsibility to back up your website. Don't ever rely on a web host or webmaster to have all of this done for you. Get this done right now, you'll be so happy you did when a problem occurs and you can breeze through it because you've got all your backups!
About the Author
Lynette Chandler helps entrepreneurs leverage readily available technology for their marketing. Learn to apply the power of technology to your marketing today http://www.TechBasedMarketing.com
Tell others about
this page:
Comments? Questions? Email Here