If your website suddenly disappeared, what would you do?
Would you be able to restore your site from a backup? Do you even have a backup? And how old is it?
You may have spent a lot of time watching videos and reading articles to set the site up yourself or you spent a little or a lot of money to have someone else develop your site for you.
Either way, your site was just the way you wanted it and then it disappeared without a trace!
If you’re like most people, your heart will skip at least one beat.
Will you have to start from scratch? Does your web designer have a recent copy? Does your host keep backups?
How could this happen? Some of the reasons your site might go down include:
- Server hard drive failure. Web servers are basically computers. If the hard drive crashes or the web server goes down, you may not be able to recover your data. Or if you do recover it all, will it be up in a timely manner?
- Your site got hacked. Hackers never seem to sleep. They are always looking for vulnerabilities. While there are steps and precautions that can be taken to lessen the likelihood of a site being hacked, there are no guarantees.
- Data loss during an upgrade. Sometimes updates result in conflicts so it’s important to backup your site before making any changes.
Best practices for backing up your site
Don’t rely on your hosting company to have a good backup of your site
A good illustration of this is a site I developed for a client a few years ago. I had backed up the site before taking it live, but a problem arose. There was a vulnerability in one of the plugins. While the hosting company kept a daily, weekly, and monthly backup, they were all infected. We had to go back to the original backup and lost changes that had been done since then.
Store your backups offsite
If the backups are stored on the same server that goes down, you will not be able to access it. Backups can be stored in a number of places, including on your hard drive, Dropbox, and Amazon S3.
If you do not currently back up your site on a regular basis, let me give you some Peace of Mind by backing up your site for you. This one simple task may be the difference between restoring your site in minutes instead of days if your site goes down.
You Can Also Check My Favorite DIY Backup Solution
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