Backup Your Site OFTEN!
After this entire situation going on and multiple requests, I cannot possibility not make a post about how to backup your website.
See this icon? It’s in your cPanel and it’s your new best friend. Use it and use it often. This post is gonna tell you how to use it and how I back up my website.
Pay close attention, this is the single most important thing you can do for your website if it means anything at all to you.
Step 1: Login to your cPanel
Step 2: Click on this backup icon
From here, you have a few different options. There are 2 that we’re going to pay close attention to.
The first: Download a home directory backup. Once you click on this, you’ll be a download. This will make sure that everything you’ve ever uploaded to FTP will get backed up. Even if you have a blog, you need to take this step to make sure that you get post images, themes, etc.
The second: Download a MySQL backup. For every database that you have on your hosted account there will be a link to download the database in this section. One by one, download each database.
Once your downloads are complete, you’ve got a full backup.
Here’s what I do.
If I take a backup of my site today, I organize it.
First I have my main folder: Im Blogging That
Inside this folder there is another: backups
Inside of backups are dated folders. Today’s backup would be stored in a folder named 10.21.07. If I backup my website tomorrow, I will not overwrite the backup I made today. Instead I’ll create a new folder in my backups folder that is named 10.22.07 and put my new backups in there tomorrow.
This means that if something happens, I can restore my site back to any date of my choosing.
Do not think that you’re going to save yourself time and click the link that reads Generate/Download a Full Backup. Really… once you generate this backup, 99% of the time you’ll forget to login via FTP and download the damn thing.
Typically, downloading a home directory backup does not take long. Follow my steps and if you decide to move hosting providers, you’re covered. If you lose your data, you’re covered.
Never, never, never rely on your host to have a backup of your website.
In this last situation I was asked “don’t you guys make a backup?†Yes, we do but it’s not for the purpose of our hosting customers. And really, here’s my challenge – find a host that says “if your site goes down and you don’t have a backup just let us know and we’ll recover it for you.â€
All my years of building websites and hosting never have I seen it. I totally believe I never will.
Backing up YOUR website is YOUR responsibility. If you read my blog (and I know you do) you know longer have any excuse.
To make it even easier, this post is going on my Memorable page. Now you can come back to it whenever you want.
How often should I make a bacup?
The answer is totally up to you. Generally do it once a week. If you’ve got a blog and you blog a lot, go more often.
If you update your website a lot, go more often.
Whatever you do – if something happens you can pretty much guarantee yourself that you won’t lose much. In this entire mess my blog suffered by losing 1 post and 3 comments. In the end, I survived.
Last thing to mention…
Your hosting account is not for data storage. If you are not actively using something on your website you should NOT be storing it in your hosting account. One of the worst plugins for WordPress is the theme switcher. Why? Because this actually encourages the user to have multiple themes upload. UGH!
Those things take up room. If you are not using them, download them to your hard drive and delete! Loading all those themes takes time, slows down your website, and most of all takes up room in your hosting account.
If half the “webmasters†online would just limit what’s in their hosting account they’d find that they could probably decrease their package size by half thus paying less for hosting each month.
You don’t want crap filling your hosting account. If you install something and don’t use it, don’t leave it. Delete it!
If a script that you’re using is updated, update your script. Outdated PHP scripts are the most common way hackers access web servers – want my mess to happen to you now? I didn’t think so. (Hackers also get in by folders that have been given permissions (chmod) that do not need permissions).
Managing a website is a full time job. Simple organization and understanding webmaster procedures will speed up the time it takes you.
There’s not excuse, do it. If you make money with your website, back it up. If your blog entries are meaningful to you, back it up. If you want to move your hosting provider, back up. If your hard drive looks like it’s got a problem, back it up!
OK, end of lecture. You get the idea. But I swear, please do not whine to me if something happens. *Ü*
Technorati Tags: Website Backup, cPanel, Web Hosting, MySQL Databases, Tutorials, How To, Webmasters, Data Storage, WordPress Themes
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Thanks for the reminder!! I need to do that, XD!!
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:19 pm
You’re very welcome :D
October 23rd, 2007 at 6:58 am
Damn you… how am I supposed to say “I never read that!” LOL Just kidding :) I’ve got my back ups and I have them all pretty and organized and I am going to be a good little blogger and “hostee” now. :p
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Ha Ha! To make it worse not only have you now read the tutorial but you got the 5 minute walk through via the phone. Yeah, you’ll be in trouble if something ever happens — and now you know it.
My goal though is to work on little tutorials like this to help people stay with it and stay on top of their data. We’ll see how that works though. :o)
January 1st, 2008 at 7:56 am
Thank you so much Katy. I am going to link to this so I have a reference handy.
January 1st, 2008 at 9:04 am
You’re very welcome :o)
January 17th, 2008 at 9:41 am
[...] January 1st, my post Back Up Your Website OFTEN! was stumbled several times. In return, I received a great deal of traffic from [...]
July 6th, 2008 at 8:29 am
Thanks for the article, it’s really very informative. As for me I am using a tool to backup website via FTP to my PC. Here is a link to the program: http://www.backupforall.com/remote/ftp-backup.php
July 11th, 2008 at 2:04 am
I should mark this post as my future reference!
July 19th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I use a PHP script to back up the thripp.com database often, and keep a local copy of all files. You can set up a cron job to do that each day.
Another good idea I don’t see mentioned often is using this LiveJournal cross-posting plugin to automatically mirror your posts to LiveJournal. It even updates when you edit or delete old posts, and has been working seamlessly for me without slowing posting down too much. Though not as good as having the database, you have a backup of each post immediately when you use it.
Also, use Feedburner’s email service to send yourself an email of your posts each day on a different server like Gmail or Hotmail.
Having multiple themes in the themes folder doesn’t slow you down because only one is active at a time. Nor does using your space for data storage. I don’t see why I can’t use the space I’m paying for as storage. Keeping old installations of WordPress is bad because they have security problems. With many hosts you can save files outside of the public_html directory so no one can get to them, which is where I store backups.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Katy, I have my cPanel automatically backup my blogs once a week. I get an email and I save it in a folder in my email account. Is that enough?
April 7th, 2009 at 2:15 am
i have never backed up my blog because i always felt that nothing wrong would happen to my site but i will now need to look into performing this sometime soon