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If you've worked hard and built a great and thriving website, you might wake up
one day and find that it has disappeared. Any number of random events can take a site down,
including hardware failure, power surges, data center fires and hosting hacking attacks. But
that doesn't matter, because you can take your backup to another provider and...
you didn't keep a backup of your site?
It's a sad, empty feeling when you realize that your carefully nurtured site
has disappeared and you can't restore a copy of it. What's that? Your provider claimed that it
backed up all sites regularly? Well, that might be true. Or it might be false. You should play
it safe and assume that your provider will suffer the same hardware failure that plagued your
machine. Since it's unlikely for your provider to have a perfect backup of everything, so you
might as well take the bull by the horns and make sure that EVERYTHING that is a part of your
site, be it content, graphics or databases, is backed up on a separate computer (perhaps the
computer on which you develop your site).
A small site doesn't take up much room, and can
be easily stored on a hard drive, or even burned to a CD for safekeeping. If you happen to run
a dedicated server or VPS, then you are in the major leagues, and spending major league cash
for your hosting. Don't compromise that by not keeping a backup of your server. Many providers
will allow you to lease space on another server, which can receive backup files over the network.
Another thing to remember is that you should ensure that your backups are complete and effective.
If you miss backing up a portion of your site content, it won't be there when things go wrong.
If you always copy your backups to the same place, it may be possible for you to write a backup
of your damaged site over a good, older copy of your backups. Try to stagger the locations of
your backups, or keep several generations, just in case.
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