Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 123!
From time to time stupid things happen to good people. Now if that alone isn’t a good enough reason to backup your web site – I don’t know what is. I learned a very valuable lesson this past weekend when upgrading WordPress on all of my projects that use it. Make sure your current theme folder does not match one of the ones that they install by default. If you do – the layout will forever be lost, and you will waste a Saturday designing a new layout.
The lessons learned from a mistake are often the best ones to learn though. That way you are sure you never fall in that same trap again.
Now there are a lot of different ways to manage a web site, so there is no way I could tell you how to backup every single kind in a 15 minute podcast. It would just be too hard. What I can do for you is to share a few organizational tips to help you get this job done.
Pick a Day for Backing Up! – Now depending on how big your web site is and how often it is updated, you might want to backup once a day, once a week or once a month. When it comes to once a week or once a month – and easy way of getting a reminder to yourself would be to use one of the many Online calendars out there.
Pick the 15th of every month to be backup day. Maybe you want to do it every Wednesday night. Whatever schedule you decide to go with make sure it is something you can stick with.
Get as Much of the “Real” Data as You Can! – There are many backup systems and scripts that dump everything into an unreadable huge file that you can not browse through. Now when backing up databases – this might be ok. When backing up pictures, HTML documents or anything else of that nature, you might want to go a different route.
The main problem I have with these services that dump everything together is it makes it hard to check and see that you got everything you should have. If at all possible, make sure you have a way of checking, importing and exporting the files in the backup.
Don’t Get Too Cocky! – Just because the worst has never happened to you. You have never lost a web site, an article or any work at all doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen. Everybody should make sure they are backing up no matter if your the most popular web site on the web or just starting out. I promise, it is a good habit to have.
Now I hope you too can learn from my mistakes. Remember to backup, because you never know when the worst might happen and you don’t want all of your hard work to vanish just because of one stupid mistake.
