Backing Up Your Website and Computer Data

I am on a personal crusade to help others realize before tragedy occurs to back up their data. This is especially true of your website hosting account. If you really commit to marketing your business using the strategies I personally use and recommend then you will be adding significant time to creating and maintaining your website. You will want to back up this data regularly and I would also stress that you should have redundant backups. Some people would quickly dismiss my warning saying that many web hosting providers offer free backup services. These same folks would say, “If my web hosting provider offers free backup services, that’s good enough and I don’t need to worry about it.” I strongly disagree.

Here’s just a recent example of why you need to have frequent and redundant backups of all your data including your web hosting account. Earlier this year, one of my web hosting providers, during a routine inspection of the fire suppression system in their data center, had a major incident. The vendor of the fire suppression system accidentally forget a step on his checklist and actually triggered the fire suppression system damaging a good number of web servers in the process. No big deal right? They do keep backups of the data. Yes, but in this albeit rare case, a small number of servers had both their main hard drives and the backup hard drive destroyed. That meant that the main web hosting account and the backup was destroyed. Some people who were not making additional local backups of their website on their own lost everything they had worked to create and do. Imagine having a website you’ve been working on for hundreds or thousands of hours that was lost without notice. Imagine if this website was responsible for a significant part of generating new business for you. What would life look like for you if you had half as much revenue coming in and had the daunting task of recreating hundreds of thousands of hours (that’s weeks or months of working 40 hours per week) just to get back to even.

So, you can see that making the process of backing up your website locally as well as letting your web hosting provider back up your website a priority is a worthwhile focus. In fact, here is what I recommend.

First, let your web hosting provider make their normal backups. Never assume that these are working correctly. You will also want to spot check them to make sure those are operating correctly and getting all the data you would need if there was a problem. Better to work through that issue while there is not an emergency than to find out later they were accidentally not backing up your database or a certain key folder of data.

Next, download on a regular basis (at least once a week) an entire copy of your website to your local computer. You can use a new folder for each of these downloads so that you have multiple copies of your website. Occasionally, like once a quarter, burn a copy of the most recent backups to a CD or DVD and take them to a location other than where your computer is and store the CD or DVD backups there. If there was a fire and your computer was destroyed you’d still have a copy of the CD or DVD at another location.

Lastly, I would also recommend you get a automatic online backup service to automatically make a backup copy of your hard drive each night. Make sure that you include the folder where you download the backup copy of your website in the list of folders to make a backup copy of. Automatic data backup services are extremely affordable (many are less than $10 per month) and can backup both your website and all the data you currently have on your local computer that you would not want to lose. I personally use iDrive as my automatic backup service and have been extremely pleased with their reliability and ease of use. I am on the paid plans because I backup a lot of data including all my music, videos, seminar recordings, documents, websites and so on. They also have a free plan which has a smaller amount of backup space.

Until my next post,

James

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