Visit the average publicly accessible webmaster forum and chances are, you’ll find a fair number of backup horror stories. Or more accurately, horror stories involving the lack of a good backup to deal with an unfortunate event. It’s easy to put it off, or just hope your web host will take care of it, but if you value the time and effort put into your website, you need to always have immediate access to a good backup of your web site.
My host takes care of backups for me…
No they don’t. There are several hosts that do list backups as a feature, but generally speaking, the backups either aren’t for you or aren’t of the quality and availability that is needed.
In the first case, all good hosts will do regular backups of their servers in case something goes wrong for them, they can easily resurrect server data and all the accounts of their wonderful (aka, paying) customers. However, very few hosts will actually go through their server copies just to find your files, at least without making you pay for the service separately from your hosting bill.
In the second case, you may actually be able to request, or directly access host-created backups, but as your host has over 100, maybe thousand, other customers, they will not be backing up your files often enough and storing long enough, to ensure good backups. You may find yourself with a month old version of your site, which had changed many times since that backup was created. Or worse, your host may backup your site between the time something does go wrong and you find out…replacing the last good backup of your web site.
What should be backed up?
Everything. Unless your site is purely static, it’s not going to do you much good to be missing your database. Likewise, a database doesn’t do much without the code in the web pages that manipulate the data in the database. Don’t forget all of your photos, miscellaneous files, and if you’re not regularly downloading via an email client, your email messages.
How often should I back up?
At least weekly, but more often if you are changing your content more than that. Prior to every major change to your site, especially database changes, backup your web site. It’s easier to copy and paste, or overwrite, existing code than it is to rewrite it and re-debug it.
How long should I keep backups?
At the very least, keep backups for a year. While it’s easy to get confident that you’d spot anything wrong with your web site, some issues may take time to develop before you realize something is wrong. Some long-building problems can be wiped out with a little adjustment, others could require days to straighten out without a backup.
How do I backup my data?
Personally, downloading all files via ftp, then a MySQL dump works for most small websites. However, there are commercial, and more automatic solutions available. I do not have any specific recommendations, as the best fit is dependent on what features you need, but there are a couple musts. Before making a longterm investment, make sure the backups created are readily available, complete, generated often enough to be useful, and not overwritten by subsequent backups.
Some alternate solutions are using Cpanel’s backup option or by archiving your files in Cpanel’s file manager. However, not all hosts have these options activated and even if they are, not as recommended.
