Backup your Blog
Never assume that your blog is safe from disaster. If your site is hosted by a third party, you might not have thought about backups. Most blogs - and websites - are hosted externally but don’t rely on your host’s backup.
Don’t be surprised also, if there’s some clause in the agreement that says they have no responsibility for the safety of your data.
How’s your blog hosted?
There’s three ways your site can be hosted, each impacting on the backup process:
A) By you. That is, you have a computer in your home or office that is acting as a server on the web. Your provide all the technical know how and software. You’re probably already be backing it up.
B) Site hosted by third party but you maintain it. These vary. You get varying degrees of software with these. My host, Blue Host, provide several blogs you can install (Nucleus which Qwerty Rash uses, Word Press, B2Evolution and pMachine Free) as well as CMSes and other online software, plus very easy to do backups. If it’s just your local ISP, you might not get much at all. Backup methods and options available will also vary.
C) Hosted Blog. eg Blogger. You do nothing pretty much. A third party just lets you sign up and you instantly have a blog. I haven’t used any of these so have no idea what services are available - especially regards backups.
Backup Regularly
Find out how to backup your blog and do it regularly. This will depend on how often you update your content. For a ProBlogger, assuming you are posting daily, you should backup daily - this is your livelihood. If there’s a disaster, you need to be up and running again as soon as possible.
If you’re with a fully hosted and maintained blog host (eg Blogger), then it may be a little harder to find out how. But email them if necessary.
If it is hosted (as per B or C), download the backup and include it in your computer’s backup regime (you do backup your computer, don’t you??)
What if my host doesn’t provide a backup process
Email them and ask them to.
In the meantime, you can always backup somehow. Even if that means something as manually intensive as printing a PDF of each of your articles. Macs and some Linux distros have PDF printing built-in. For Windows, there’s plenty of third-party addons (eg Cute PDF) that add that functionality.
Store the PDFs in a folder and then back that up. Sure recovery will take longer, but it’s better than nothing.
Test your backup
This isn’t easy, and you may not have the technical skills to do this but if you can, set up a duplicate system on your own computer and try restoring to it.
Make Multiple copies
When it comes to backups, a little paranoia is under-kill. I backup to four different sources
- Daily of critical data to an online storage service (totally separate to my site host)
- A couple of times a day (depending on how much writing I’ve done) to a USB key. This is not my blog tho. That goes on my daily HDD
- Daily to and external HDD (in my case, a 30Gb iPod). This has two alternating destinations for my backup. This is important! Where possible, never overwrite the previous backup.
- Monthly to DVD-R
Provided I follow this regime, I am reasonably well covered. There is of course one flaw in my backup plan, and one that afflicts any home user or person working from home. Offsite storage.
Offsite Storage
Store some backups offsite. At worst maybe a weekly to CD-R at your neighbour’s or friend’s or parent’s.
Changing hosts
Backups serve another valuable purpose besides restoring your site in case of disaster. It also enables you to relocate to another host. If your host shutdown tonight, how long before you’d be up and running again?
What if you couldn’t rebuild your site with data? How long would your goodwill carry you? Without a backup, all your member subscriptions would be lost. You won’t be real popular if they all have to re-register…
But I’m just doing this for fun
Maybe today, but what if that changes? And how much fun will it be if you lose a year, two years, three years or more of your sweat and identity? The words you write are a piece of you. People whose houses burn down often regret losing the years of photos. Don’t regret losing years of your musings, they are just as valuable.
Backup. Go do it now.
Great advice here. I tend to be a backup freak myself, since I had a scare two years ago with a good deal of data I almost lost, and I’ve never regretted taking the few extra minutes to download a backup or perform a cron job. One is never safe from losing data, or from a host suddenly going down. Even if it’s "only for fun", it’s always worth being able to retrieve this data a few years laters. The photos comparison is indeed a good one here.
For those of us who use Blogger, fear not, there is a way to backup your blog.
You can read more about it on Blogger’s Help page:
<a href="http://help.blogger.com/bin...">How do I create a backup of my entire blog?</a>
Great article, it’s actually funny because I wrote a similar one last night for posting on one of my blogs today.
If you’re looking for a good way to backup your blog you can always either GMail it to yourself or create a special GMail account specifically for backups. This insures that you always have access to all your backups.
I use WordPress and a plugin that allows me to email the backup files directly which makes things work great!
Great advice about backups. I have a fairly good backup plan for my current blog, but I am changing to WordPress from b2evolution and haven’t looked into that yet for them (one of a few issues that need resolving before the final move over).
A bit of advice, though, since I also use <a href="http://www.bluehost.com/tra...">Blue Host</a> for my web hosting. They have a pretty good affiliate program, and if you are going to recommend them, you might as well get the $65 if somebody signs up under you. I notice your link wasn’t an affiliate one, so you might want to sign up (<a href="http://partner.bluehost.com">partner.bluehost.com</a>) . It’s simple to do and fairly transparent; you just put their website/track/your-code/anything-you-want-for-tracking-purposes as the URL and that will redirect them to the home page. My link to them at the top of this note is an example; if you sign up, feel free to edit my comment so it has your code instead. I’ve only gotten a few people to sign up, and it takes a few months to get it, but hey, I am happy with the service and don’t mind recommending them.