You can never have enough back ups. Never ever.
Maybe it’s human nature but we have all been guilty of the saying “It’ll never happen to me”. I think we all must have thought it at different points in our life.
It can be either personal photos or important documents and we’ll all easily say “I’ll do that tomorrow another day won’t matter” then before you know it a few months have gone by ( if you’re lucky ) and it’s still not done.
Your website is your shop window for the whole world and if, for what ever reason it was to be lost how much business would you lose?
Servers can go down for loads of different reasons and a lot of the time they will be fine but there are times when they won’t. Then that fancy awesome looking website is lost along with all that time and money you had put into it. A server is just like your PC if you don’t shut it down properly there’s a risk of it breaking but also all electronics have a certain lifespan and you won’t know when it’s the end of the line.
Story Time…
It could be human error. In a previous job the company had just paid for a new server and I had started to migrate sites over ( late night session to reduce and interruptions ). It was going great until I got back from lunch one day and the boss looked like he had seen a ghost. He had set up RAID configuration on the server ( meaning one hard drive is replicated to another ) which had wiped the sites I had moved.
At that time the company didn’t have a back up process in place. Lucky enough I had made my own back ups for each of the sites I had worked on and was able to restore most of the sites in a short period of time keeping downtime to a minimum.
Ever since then I have always done my own back ups regardless of a companies back up process. You can never have too many back ups.
Back up offerings
Some hosting companies offer back ups as part of the hosting service. The company I use automatically backs up each individual account on my server every 3-4 hours. This includes all of the site files as well as the database. Great peace of mind.
Not all hosting companies offer that but have a look to see if they offer a service because for a potential few extra quid it will pay for itself in the long run.
Back ups are just like house or car insurance. It’s there just incase and hopefully you will never have to use but if you do there’s less stress and worry.
There are a few different reasons you would need to use a back up:
- The server breaks and everything is lost
- Someone accidentally deletes some data
- An unauthorised user access the site and defaces it
Options
If you have a WordPress site there are a couple of plugins which can do back ups for you the one I use is UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin and the free version has loads of options which should be enough to get you started.
Once you have a back up I recommend storing that back up somewhere. pCloud is a great priced and easy to use solution.
Back up personal stuff too
On a personal back up if you have loads of photos ( just like my partner does ) I’d recommend Google Photos. You install the app and set it to do automatic back ups. The pCloud app also does that too.
Backing up everything that is important to you is becoming more and more important.
I’m here to help
If you need a hand setting up some back ups either a plugin for WordPress or a bespoke service. I offer a back up service where I back up your website files and database and supply that to you. Or just get in touch if you need some advice on back ups be it business or personal.