Why website backups are important for restore in case of problems or downtimes - Part 1
Many people think that website backups are not so important for the webmaster.
Most of these group of people are either newbie webmasters or those seasoned yet busy webslaves who bang their heads and fingers on their keyboards almost 20 hours per day. (Been there, done that.)
Who can blame them? What is important for them is to launch a new website, redesign an existing one, renovate the graphics, add more content, fix the scripts, optimize the page for search engines and so many other boring stuff to the non-web geeks.
Since this is the case, someone has to let these people know when to stop on what they are doing and take a while to assess the online risks and threats to their websites. And that’s what this blog is all about.
The question now is, how will these people realize the value of backing up their websites?
The answer is simple.
When they lost (or almost lost) one or more of their websites in a server crash or problems (like hardware crash,ddos attacks, severe downtimes, hacking incidents and the likes), that’s when they will value their backups. When they are left with nothing to restore their creation to their recent state, that’s when it sinks in.
But should the average web joe wait for disaster before he/she wakes up to this reality? Hell NO!
Take it from me.
I have been building and operating websites for more than 5 years and I have lost many many websites in the process due mainly to my fault - no backups. Can’t really blame my host, No. They would not accept their fault either. And in case they are really at fault, they wont pay up damages (as they are covered in the online contract (TOS) I agreed when I signed up). So useless to argue. Such a waste of time to even rant at your host.
No one at the that time is telling me to do this thing - website backup. Who cares? I was making money anyway. I was so complacent with my ever wonderful hosting control panel (cPanel is my favorite) and I thought hey this thing is so good I have no room for error. But I was wrong..
Now I would like to discuss here why website backup should be one of the Webmasters’ priority in their everyday online. This will be part 1 of the series as this might be too long to read..
Website backups are important BECAUSE:
1. IT CAN MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER EVEN DURING THE MOST TRAGIC ONLINE PROBLEMS.
Imagine if you wake up today and saw that your website is gone, cannot be found or offline (in short, your website is down). Now imagine that after so much silence from your host your site is now up but lo, no index page and no web files. You will then receive an email shortly from them telling you that they can no longer recover your websites due to a very terrible accident (of sort whatever) that happened to their server or datacenter where the server is hosted. They further tell you that they dont have backups so you have to upload your sites to an empty hosting space.
Crazy eh? No. It happened to me before sometime in 2004.
Two things can happen here.
One : You just stay cool and calm because at the back of your mind you know you have the most recent website backups to restore anytime.
Two: It makes you wanna cry or bang the doors of your host since you are so angry if you don’t have your backups and you lost all or part of your websites. This also mean that you might need to start again from scratch, talk and explain to your subscribers, customers and/or members what happened and how sorry about the situation.
I tell you, being in the number Two position sucks. Not only is it embarassing. It is so damaging to your online reputation. And that’s where it hurt so much. Your online reputation as a responsible webmaster suffers and shows that you are not so concerned about the welfare of your business and online customers.
I will continue ranting on this the next time. We have more reasons and examples that will show you why you should backup your websites today and everytime that you can.
Till next time.