Top 7 Things Website Owners Should Know When Backing Up Their Website

In today’s world of internet blogging/websites, taking a few moments to make an easy, quick and convenient backup of your database will save you untold hours, days or even weeks of hard work. Listed below are seven important things you’ll need to know about backing up your website, before disaster strikes unexpectedly.

1- How Many Times Should You Backup?

It’s your call. How important that data is, and how often you want to backup may depend on how often you make updates.

2- How Many Backups Should You Keep?

At least three copies in different places. You can use CD/DVDs, an external hard drive, a thumb drive or flash drive or one of several online backup servers. The important thing is to regularly keep everything backed up.

3- Can Backups Be Automatically Set?

Yes. However, you will do best if you do a manual backup in addition to an automatically scheduled backup. Online backup services today offer many options, but it’s always a good idea to do a free trial run of the service to see how efficiently they function. Some of the most reputable services you may try are Carbonite, Mozy, and iCloud just to mention a few. Some offer free trial or promotional offers usually for a one month basis, so choose wisely.

4- Failure to Back-up Your Site Can Be Costly

The latest statistics from one online survey indicates a full 90 percent of business blogs suffering from data loss find themselves shutting down just two years after the loss of data occurred. A startling 43 percent of blogs suffering any kind of disaster such as fire, flood, or failure to have an implemented plan, never fully recover. About 70% of blog owners experienced data loss due to accidental deletion, disk failure, malware, or hacking.

5- Database Backup or Full Backups?

We highly recommend running database backups for quick, frequent backups and running full backups to safeguard your images, themes, and plugins.

6- Backing Up Off-Site

In addition to having your own backed up copies of the site, we suggest sending your website copy to an online, off-site facility for regular scheduling. It is not generally a good idea to store everything you have on the same server as your web hosting server.

7- Backup Software

With so many good, and not so good, backup software packages available, your best bet would be to carefully compare different types of data backup software.

Backing up your website is perhaps one of the most vitally important tasks, and the wisest, you’ll ever do regardless of what blogging platform you are on.

Author Bio – Peter is a technical writer and data specialist, specializing in data backup and recovery.