The first step in protecting your site from disaster

I still remember how it felt to make that call. Equal parts fear and anxiety. Sprinkled liberally with embarassment.

I was still in college but had managed to land my first real web design job. And I thought I was about to lose it. I had just uploaded some changes to a client’s live site and now it was horribly broken.

In those days our backup strategy was simply copying the file you were about to change and naming it something like bad_idea BU.asp. Except, for whatever reason, this time I didn’t have that backup. And things were very broken. Crap.

Luckily that story has a happy ending. I was able to call our web host and get them to restore the file I’d goofed up from one of their backups. (In those days our host was just two guys whose direct numbers were on speed dial.) Several hand-wringing minutes later, everything was back to normal. Lesson learned.

The moral of the story is that if you don’t have a backup of your site, you’re flirting with disaster. If your business is at all dependent upon your online presence (and trust me, it is) losing the website you’ve worked so hard on could be devastating.

Gone in 60 seconds

I have a colleague who recently had problems with the server hosting their website. The database that powers the site got corrupted while saving some data and became unusable. All of the content of their site was gone. In less than 60 seconds, 5 years of hard work and over 1000 posts simply disappeared. Except we had set up automated backups about a year prior. Within a few minutes, we had restored the most recent backup and everything was back to normal. Crisis averted. Instant hero status.

The lifesaver

For WordPress backups, I can’t recommend iTheme’s BackupBuddy highly enough. BackupBuddy is a paid plugin. But it’s worth its weight in gold. In the case of my colleague, what do you think it would’ve cost to replace 5 years of website content?

The BackupBuddy plugin for WordPress has a number of really great benefits. But the most important two in my mind are:

  1. BackupBuddy allows you to schedule backups so that they happen automatically. Schedule daily, weekly, or monthly backups with BackupBuddy so you can focus on your business and never worry about having to remember to take backups again.
  2. BackupBuddy allows you to store your backups in a remote location. The only thing worse than not having a backup is having a backup you can’t get to. If your site goes down, backups stored on your server may be inaccessible. BackupBuddy can move backups to remote locations like your Dropbox account, inbox, or Amazon S3. They even offer their own storage service Stash.

iThemes has a number of great BackupBuddy tutorial videos that walk through scheduling backups and setting up remote storage (it’s easier than you think).

A backup a day

It’s easy to think you only need backups if you’re careless and make mistakes or don’t have a reliable host. But backups let you quickly put things back the way they were if you make changes to your site and then change your mind. They also come in handy for moving your site between servers. Backups are also a necessity for things outside of your control like restoring a hacked site. Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it can’t happen to you.

If you’re not already taking regular backups of your site, you can have BackupBuddy making automatic regular backups for you and storing them remotely in less than 30 minutes. Think about getting that done today.