When people think of backing up their vital information their
thoughts rarely commit to backing up their websites. Backing up
the information on your hard drive is obvious, but the information
on your websites is just as essential to your business and you
need to have a plan for backing it up. You may think that your web
host or designer will take care of this, but don’t rely on anyone to
do your backing up on something so important. The best laid plans
don’t always work out so having more than one plan is a good
idea. Here are some things that can happen if you don’t plan and
execute the back up of your websites (and many of these actually
happened).

1. You are pruning your message forums and accidentally delete a
large chunck of information that you didn’t mean to!

2. The web hosting company you’ve been with for years and years
has gone out of business unexpectedly or quickly sells to another
host you haven’t had a good experience with.

3. Upgrades are happening with your webhost causing your site
to go down for hours, sometimes even for a day. This is a true
story!

4. You work with several people ‘live’ on a website. They
accidentally overwrote your work and you didn’t save a copy of the
page.

5. You need to put your site back to the way it was before you did
anything because after trying to upgrade the software or scripts
it’s not working right.

6. Your web host holds your site or domain captive. Pending your
dispute, you need to setup your site all over again even in another
place and domain.

7. Your website gets hacked and everything was deleted. I’ve
experienced this. While not everything was deleted, it was a large
enough chunk. Also, in those early days, I had just learned to edit
websites live and had no copy on my hard drive.

8. Even though your web host does keep backups, they are not
the ones you need. Let me illustrate with an example on a site I
once managed: We needed to restore a database and I asked
the host for help. They told me that they had three backups to
choose from, but one was from before the problem and the other
two were for right after the problem. This was disappointing
because the backup we needed wasn’t available and the ones
they had were missing the one that came between that we
needed. We had no choice but to go with the oldest one and lose
a few days worth of content.

9. While moving web hosts, due to a misunderstanding, the old
account was canceled and deleted too early.

10. Your web host reviewed your site and decides you have
violated their terms of service and shuts down your account in
short notice.

11. You uploaded the wrong site or folder and overwrote the
previous one. It’s easy to do this type of thing if you are using FTP
and have a huge list of sites you’re working it.

12. You or someone reinstalled FrontPage extensions and now
your redirects, error pages, fancy URL’s and what not don’t work
anymore. You see, when you reinstall FrontPage extensions, it re-
creates all your .htaccess files. That means, any customizations
you had will also be lost.

13. You had custom programming done to your scripts. Your new
web master upgraded the script and can’t remember where or
what all the modifications are. Worst, he/she doesn’t know how to
re-program those customizations.

14. A hacker inserted malicious code on all your website’s pages
and you need to rollback to the previous good version.

15. When moving web hosts your blog’s database wasn’t copied
and now you can’t gain access to your old site’s files.

You are the only one who is responsible for backing up your
websites information. Don’t go looking to your web host to have
all this for you, they won’t. Get your site backed up, and do it now.
When and if you ever do have problems you’ll be so thankful you
don’t have to go through a lot of hastle to get everything back in
working order.

Article by:

Lynette Chandler helps entrepreneurs leverage readily available technology for their marketing. Learn to apply the power of technology to your marketing

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