After having setup your website at a web host and enjoying the experience of working on your site adding content and promoting it in the search engines it is all too easy to become distracted with the tasks that you have to do that you may forget a few other and important things that you need to do in order to make sure that you are prepared for anything going wrong, and one of those very important jobs in backups.

Backing up your website and if you are running any databases, backing up those too is something that can often be forgotten about, after all you are busy building your website up and have enough to think about already, and thats a fair enough statement, but if the worst happens, and say your web host lost your work and they didn't have backups or for some reason couldn't provide backups, then this could leave you in a very awkward situation indeed, it would result in a potential loss of all of your work, or a partial loss, not to mention the headache of dealing with this type of situation, and maybe even a large financial loss depending on the type of website and information lost.

Most decent web hosting companies will have backups and often have their own plans in place as an extra safety net, but sometimes customers can depend on this too much and get a false sense of security from this where the customer ( yourself ) may forget about taking their own backups and keeping them safe.

And there is always that feeling of it wont happen to me, well even if you are with a well known and reputable web hosting service and they assure you that your websites are backed up, i would say that as an extra precaution that you should make sure that you take daily backups of your websites. As a bare minimum you should backup your databases daily, it is something that i make a habit of and my work routine means that within the last hour of myself being online that i go into Cpanel in my hosting account and i backup all of my MySQL databases to my computer and take a home directory backup too. If you are running a large website or a number of websites from one hosting account and the home directory backup is quite large, then i guess once every few days or once weekly would be acceptable, at least if the worst happend and your web host couldn't provide a recent backup for you then at least your loss would be a maximum of a weeks work, but if you can avoid any loss at all then of course this is the ideal situation.

Dependant on your web hosting account and what may be included it should be a one click process for each backup download in most cases, from within Cpanel it is easy, or you can backup a MySQL database for example by going into phpmyadmin and exporting the SQL file.

Every now and then make sure that you then transfer all of your recent backup files from your desktop or laptop onto CD's or DVD's so that if you have a computer hardware failure then you can fall back on the disks knowing that your work is safe. It may sound extreme but it is worth doing.

If you are a little more experienced you can often setup backups to be automatic so that they are emailed to you or downloaded to a specific location, this way you can carry on with the comfort of knowing that you are prepared but without having to deal with it manually.

Backup your files today, you may just need them when you least expect it.

Filed under: Database Advice by admin Published May 29, 2008