Back it up or lose it

The title says it all! Sooner or later you will have a catastrophic failure of everything electronic. Your computer, your web server, your website, your smart phone, whatever. Trust me on this one! The only thing you can do is keep recent backups so you have some recourse when disaster happens.

Today, I want to focus on your website. First, don’t count on your web hosting company to keep backups for you. They may, or they may not, but it is really YOUR responsibility to have a recent backup of your site. And best yet, have one that you keep off site, say, on your computer.

How often you should back up your site depends on how often it changes. An active membership site, every day is not too often; a pretty much static site perhaps every week or every month for a really static site.

Virtually no matter what technology you use for your website, there is likely some great backup choices. We use strictly Joomla, and Akeeba backup, a truly great product that allows you to schedule backups and to set up off-site storage. They make a version for WordPress, but we haven’t used it.

Let me close with a horror story that could have been avoided. We had a client once whose site got infected with malware that actually destroyed the site (basically, the site ate itself). It took him so long to figure it out, that the hosting service had recycled its backups and did not have a backup that was not contaminated. And he did not have any backups of his own. His choice? Rebuild the site from scratch! Hopefully that’ll learn ya!