Why Website Back-ups Matter

Imagine something happens to your site – maybe a hacker, maybe just an internal issue. What’s next? All you want to do is undo the changes that occurred – but how do you do it?

Backup and recovery is essential. Failure to have verified backup and recovery procedures puts your website data at risk of permanent loss.

Website owners often only learn this lesson after critical information they require is permanently lost. Attempting to recover from data loss can be both time consuming and extremely difficult. So learn from others mistakes, and ensure beforehand that you have a system in place that protects your data and suits your needs.

Why are Website Back-ups so Important?

There are five reasons why you should back up your website:

1. It’s not your web host’s responsibility to make back ups available to you.
Most web hosts don’t back up your website regularly. Of the few that do, most of them simply do so for their own protection and don’t make the files available to their customers.

2. Storing the original development site isn’t enough.
If you developed your site on a test server, or your local computer, you may think that’s enough to protect you. However, over time, websites are tweaked and changed and those changes often won’t be reflected in the original version. If you run a forum, blog or CRM system, much of your valuable content is updated regularly, and won’t exist in any other place than on your website.

3. You need to be ready to react quickly.
Having an up to date back up in place will allow you to get back online quickly after a mishap. There are many reasons why you need to get your website back online quickly including loss of income and potential SEO penalties (according to some sources).

4. Peace of mind.
Once you have regular back-ups taking place your stress levels will fall. There’s no “what ifs”. Your website is an important part of your business and back-ups are insurance against a major loss.

5. It’s your protection against viruses.
Web hosts don’t tend to proactively run virus and malware scanners against your website. Therefore, keeping a backup may be your easiest, and best protection; allowing you to turn back the clock after an attack. While this doesn’t prevent attacks, it does cure them when needed.

How Do I Restore My Backup?

So your sites’ been hacked and the hosting company tells you this.

You’ve got a backup? No. Things are bad….Scream, throw the laptop out…Go to the contact form and call me!

You’ve got a backup? Yes. Things aren’t too bad….

Do you know what to do next?

A WordPress installation is made up of two things: firstly, the files which are on disk, and secondly the (MySQL) database Restoring a backup in principle should be a 2 step process –

• Restore the files
• Restore the database.

If you are not familiar with the back-up program you may not even know where to get the files. Once you find the files you may not know which steps you use to restore the file and database and the correct order in which to restore them.

Confused??????

You’re right to be!!!

Most people don’t even think about back-ups. Those who do, and implement them aren’t sure how to find them and if they do, don’t know what to do with them.

What’s the solution?

Get Smiling Spiders to do the back-ups.

You do what you’re best at and Smiling Spiders takes care of the rest!

Just call us when you have a problem and we’ll sort it out