Always backup! No ifs or buts

Hostlumina

Active Member
Hey there!

How are you? Oops.... you just spilled coffee over your laptop and your hear some crackling followed by smoke.. Oh oh.... Computer might be fried... Not a problem, take out the hard drive and connect it to another computer or external adapter. SHOOT!!!! My hard drive is pooched, 3 years worth of data gone!!!!

Yep, this can happen to any individual and/or business at any given moment. This is why it's very important to always create a backup plan for yourself for all your web files.

Your backup plans should be based on how important your data is and you should have it stored in different devices if possible. If your web host offers back ups offsite that is GREAT!!! however, don't depend on it and always have a third resource just in case of a worse case scenario.

Back to the plan, what should it consist of? Well, there are couple of items to consider that you can also apply to your personal data at home.

- Are you going to go with an automatic (cron, additional software, etc...) or manually process the backup and if so how will you remind yourself of this task in a weekly daily, or monthly basis?

- Offsite (back up storage will need to be purchase or a small VPS) or downloading the backup to your home or office (usually depends on size and your b/w allowance per ISP).

- If downloading to home or office where and how many copies will you be planning to keep?

- Frequency of making the backups either daily, weekly, or monthly.

- Choose a time to do it. When choosing a time you might want to check with your host. Some only allow specific window times and most importantly your lowest traffic time to keep peak performance.

- How long do you want to keep the backups for or are required to keep by law (depending on business + data type)

- Lastly, always make an immediate back up prior and after making any changes to your site.


Personal recommendations on how often you should backup.

Daily to several times a day backups - Crucial sites where content is constantly changing (by the minute, hourly, or couple times a day) such as eCommerce site, blog, forum, database, CRM, etc... This obviously will depend on the size of the business, community, etc...

Weekly backups - For dynamic or static sites where data changes once or twice a week. example - a blog where you post once a week with no comments or very minimal comments or a html site that you update weekly.

Monthly backups
- Static web sites that you make changes to once or every other couple months.

**Immediate Backups - This is very important that I find people forget. Always back up prior a change and after a change you make (i.e. script update, code modification, installing add-on, etc...)


Has disaster ever struck you before? What changes have you done since that you can share with the rest to help create and improve current backup plans?
 

elcidofaguy

Active Member
Hostlumina great post!!! I certainly need to look into improving how I backup my work, especially with using automation/cron jobs... Currently I use drop box to backup my most important files as well as removable hard drive... I also do a lot of software development and as such I highly recommend the use of configuration control such as VSS, Subversion etc...

For some time now I've been thinking about moving all my work files to the cloud in order to completely remove reliance on locally stored data as the coffee spillage risk or simply your PC dying on you is just a matter of time.... My plan in this case would be to integrate configuration control so that files can be checked out, worked on my local machine and once completed I can then check it back in again...

I also have a few VPS and as such I should ought to use that as a means for backup also... It could even be used to replicate website and if sh** ever hit the fan with web hosts such as DDOS attack, server going down - I could quickly change the DNS settings and point it to my backup site..

In addition i've been planning for sometime how to figure out how to automate the process with database and file/folder backups with linking it to drop box... I've seen a couple of tutorials online so will give that a go in the near future... Its certainly on my to do list ;-)
 

RDO Servers

Active Member
Hostlumina great post!!! I certainly need to look into improving how I backup my work, especially with using automation/cron jobs... Currently I use drop box to backup my most important files as well as removable hard drive... I also do a lot of software development and as such I highly recommend the use of configuration control such as VSS, Subversion etc...

For some time now I've been thinking about moving all my work files to the cloud in order to completely remove reliance on locally stored data as the coffee spillage risk or simply your PC dying on you is just a matter of time.... My plan in this case would be to integrate configuration control so that files can be checked out, worked on my local machine and once completed I can then check it back in again...

I also have a few VPS and as such I should ought to use that as a means for backup also... It could even be used to replicate website and if sh** ever hit the fan with web hosts such as DDOS attack, server going down - I could quickly change the DNS settings and point it to my backup site..

In addition i've been planning for sometime how to figure out how to automate the process with database and file/folder backups with linking it to drop box... I've seen a couple of tutorials online so will give that a go in the near future... Its certainly on my to do list ;-)


If you already have multiple VPS's, you can rsync them to keep everything up-to-date between the 2. If you have enough space, backup your local files/SubVersion repository to your VPS. You could even use. DNS made easy to automate the DNS failover in case 1 VPS goes down in the middle of the night.
 

animeshe14

Member
I will surely do this. Just have to save enough money to buy an external drive.

I know the feeling of loosing years worth of data, it can literally make you cry.
 
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