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[18/12/2009] How to backup my website?
I had created a website a year ago and it was working beautifully. Not a single glitch ever, it attracted a growing number of visitors each day. I offered web design services in London on the internet from and my website had details on everything. I had included images and a lot of other content. Then one day the inevitable happened. A virus affected my web server and my entire website was gone, just like that. I was on the verge of incorporating a lot of changes onto my website to improve its look and feel and make it more user-friendly. I lost everything. All this because I had no back-up of any of the files. I couldn’t but help feeling lost like a puppy and didn’t know what to do. I was angry with myself that I had thrown caution to the winds and allowed one simple virus to ruin everything that I had built. It took me a long time to redo my entire work and I lost significant amount of business. But it was a lesson well learnt and today I ensure I back-up everything.You might think that something like this will never happen to you. But it well might. There is a host of ways in which your website might suffer. The files that are stored on the web server could get deleted; there could be a major crash of the web host server, the hard drive that stores all the files pertaining to your website might just give up. Wait, there are more. Someone could hack his way to your system and erase all the files, or that virus that affected my website could well be targeting your web server soon, or in some cases, a version of your files that is old could be written on the existing one.
Now that you have understood the importance of backing up your files, you might want to know how to go about the same. Your web hosting provider may be the best in the business but might not offer this service. You might learn about this once you’ve been told to read the rules in fine print. Now what? Not to despair, my friend, if the internet had ways to bring you to your knees, it also offers adequate support to get back and working.
You could have used a HTTP protocol to upload your website onto the server. Use the same to save your website. Your web browser provides a tool to save the pages individually. Make use of these if your website is not too large. Always make more than one back-up for your website. In case one gets corrupted, you can always fall back on the other(s). Ensure that these are all named correctly. Also the other important thing is to know and remember where you are going to store the back-up. If, like me, you frequently modify your website, it would be better if you save these changes as well. Otherwise you might end up forgetting what the changes looked like and starting all over again can be quite a painful task. You can also create back-ups in the web hosting servers. It is quite laborious but well worth it. It is also easy to recover your website from these servers in case you lose your files. Using your back-up files, you can get your website back on track. Do not forget to back-up your data on customers such as the email sending lists. You cannot afford to lose this piece of vital information. If your website is large, then you could make use of disks called RAID that help making two creations of the same information.
Whatever technique you use should be efficient enough to save you from the disaster that struck me. Back-up is a means to protect you from any crashes.
