It's Back Up Sunday
Posted On: 2006-12-04
So when was the last time you backed up your important files
Steve's main desktop is beginning to show obvious signs of fatigue. Images are opening from the bottom up, pasting anything often results in it being pasted twice, just a couple of Firefox windows open at once can cause it to freeze, some icons have disappeared from his desktop and the sound has vanished from the Windows Media Player and no matter what Steve does it won't come back.
So now, after nearly three years of running 24/7 it's going down to the shop tomorrow to be reincarnated into a smaller box. There will be a new motherboard, a new smaller case, a new DVD burner and a new hard drive but it will still have the same processor and all the extra cards he has in the old box will be carried over to the new one.
While the old hard drive will be kept as a slave Steve is still busy backing everything up from that hard drive because accidents can happen when a computer is in being repaired and valuable data can be lost. To avoid that he's backing everything up onto a hard drive we use for storage.
Of course, this is not the only time Steve has ever backed everything up. Many years ago another adult webmaster got us into the habit of backing everything up every Sunday and that is a very good habit to get into. When you get yourself into the groove of backing up on a particular day of the week every week you won't feel the pain so badly if a hard drive dies or your data is destroyed.
Back up your server too
But your computer hard drives are not the only things that you should be backing up. Several months ago one of our clients had his server hacked and everything was wiped. He had presumed that his host was providing back ups that he could use to recover but sadly he was mistaken.
He lost graphics, he lost text and he lost his income. He didn't back anything up because he thought his host was doing it but when it all went pear shaped he found that the only person who was backing anything up was me. I was keeping copies of all the blog entries and other text that I was doing for him.
But that wasn't much help without the graphics and the images that had appeared on his site. It has taken him months to track down the designer he used and get the graphics replaced and at the same time he had to put in a heap of work to get his images back online too.
So don't just 'think' that your host is backing everything up. In these days of content management systems and MySQL data bases that allow you to add content direct to the server via online control panels it is way too easy to lose just about everything if it all goes wrong.
That means that you have to KNOW that you are getting those backups. Either organize to have a daily cron job done to download the data on your server to your own PC or be prepared to pay a little extra and have your data backed up every day by your host.
Think of backups as an insurance policy to protect your business and allow you to recover quickly from any major disaster. And never think that major disasters cannot happen to you because they most certainly can and will happen.
I know that backing up can be a drag; if you work hard there can be a lot of data to back up even in just the space of a week and it can and does take time. But not backing is leaving yourself totally unprepared for when disaster strikes. Depending on how well you have prepared for that disaster you will either recover quickly or your business may never recover.
When all your business files and the data that you used to build your business up disappears in the blink of an eye it can be completely demoralizing. I've seen many newbies - as well as more experienced webmasters - who could not face the prospect of trying to recover from a major data loss and they have just shut up shop.
But if you are prepared a hard drive crash or a hack of your server does not have to be the end of the world. When something like that happens it is always going to be a hassle but if you have your data backed up recovery can take a few hours instead of a weeks or even months.
So set aside time to back up all your files and do it whether you think you need to or not.