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Back Up Your Web Site – This is Critical

By admin | March 7, 2008

*** This post is intended for everybody ***

Backup your web site is critical. Its common sense I know, but I also know its human nature to think “it will never happen to me”. Sods Law says it will :-(

Disk drives are mechanical … and they break.

We do an automatic, global, daily backup of the entire contents of our server … ie. all websites. This is necessary if we ever have a hardware failure and our disk drives crash, and we have to restore everything.

I do not do backups of individual sites.

Keeping a backup of your site is your own responsibility as a webmaster.

If you have a standard (read as, “non database driven”) site then the best way to back it up is to just use your FTP client and download a full copy onto your own PC. When you make changes to pages please make sure you have those new changes in your latest backup set.

In the case where you have a dynamic script/database driven site (like Wordpress, Joomla, etc) then backing up by FTP is not enough. You will need to keep a copy of your database as well. FTP does not grab your MySQL database.

There is an excellent free tool that allows you to do this, called HeidiSQL … which you can download from http://www.heidisql.com … and is the exact tool that I use for all of my own MySQL database requirements. It can export your MySQL database as a text file onto your PC … and you can use this to import/restore that database should you ever need to.

There is a tool for backing up in your server Cpanel … although personally I find it very limiting and I do not use it.

Unless you are constantly changing your website every day then it is not necessary to take daily backups. It just places unnecessary load on the server. Weekly, or whenever you make changes is fine.

Please include backups as part of your web site maintenance ritual … I would hate for you to lose your online business.

If you have any trouble backing up your site then please do not hesitate to give me a shout and I can gladly assist you.

Have a great weekend.

Topics: Server Info, Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

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