Importance of Website Site Backups
Performing regular website backups should be an integral part of any site owner’s maintenance process. Whilst many people understand the importance of the need for backing up their computer data. When you ask many website owners when they perform backups of their website, and you will be surprised they probably don’t know they need to perform backups or don’t have a regular backup process in place. When was the last time you thought of backing up your website?
Backups should be a crucial whatever the size of your site. Ensuring that you have regular website backups ensures that all your hard work in creating a website doesn’t go to waste.
Whilst there are various reasons why you need to ensure you backup your website. Here are some of nightmare scenarios that will make you glad you have a backup of your site handy:
You Accidentally Delete the Wrong File or Folder
Picture this scenario. You are performing updates to your site and accidentally delete a file or folder. Without a backup you are at the mercy being able to find a local copy of the file or recreating it from scratch. To avoid the losses and shame of this, ensure that you have a safe way of backing the website. Backups should be done regularly so as to avoid losing any data. However having a backup restoring the file becomes very easy.
Website Updates Can Go Wrong
If you regularly perform updates on your website such as updating software, plugins & themes. You will be well aware that things can and unfortunately do go wrong. This can due to bug in the update or incompatibility with other plugins or software that can lead to a crashed website. For scenarios like this, ensuring that you are well prepared for this by backing up the website before you perform the update. No matter how much you trust the updates, you never know when one or two procedures will go wrong leading to a total nightmare.
Anyone that has been in situation knows it always happens at the worst time possible. Imagine clicking on the update button, and after the update, the website is gone? Then the next minute your boss is calling asking why he not able to reach the website while he was in the middle of a presentation? Or you decide to perform an update as your last job before you leave work for the evening. You are then stuck for hours after work trying to fix the update. The quickest way out of this mess would be to restore a backup that is most recent, if you are holding regular website backups of your site.
Website Hacking Has Ruined Several Businesses
The cases of website hacking have been on the rise almost daily, especially among open-source software such as WordPress. Hackers are targeting sites like this because of how easy find vulnerabilities in software of this nature. You may not be able to always protect yourself, from being hacked (although regularly updating and patching software will help). However by ensuring that you hold regular and up to date backups of your website. At least you will have a restore point in case you land in the hands of these malicious hackers.
Imagine waking up in the morning to find that your website has been hacked. Not only can lost man hours trying to undo the damage caused, without a proper website backups it mean you could not be in business as soon as tomorrow. Being able to restore from a backup not only allows you to save valuable man hours. Time which could be spent patching and fixing vulnerabilities within your website.
Servers Crush Just like Computers
Your server is prone to various factors that can lead to crashing anytime. If the server crashes and the drives become unreadable, then the fastest plan would be restore the site to a new or failover server. If you have your website on the failover server, then you will be up and running within the shortest time possible.
How to Backup your Website
There are various ways that you can backup your website data:
- Choose a hosting provider that offers hosting with a website backup service. Some providers offer this as part of their services others provide this as an optional extra. So check with your web hosting company.
- If you using a hosting provider that uses cPanel.
- Manually create your own backups of website databases and files.
Its always good to have a saved copy on your computer, in addition to regular off-site backups. Its important to remember though that backups don’t have to take a lot of time or cost a lot of money.
Photo credit: Janitors on VisualHunt.com / CC BY