Computers crash. No news there. But what happens if the computer on which your website lives crashes? Do you have backups of your site? How current are those backups?

For years I got my clients hosted with one company. The owner, Tina Peters, had a small cult following in the web design world because of her seemingly instant availability to fix problems or offer helpful advice. When health problems forced her to sell the company last year, service went to hell almost immediately.

Trouble tickets that once got taken care of in minutes or hours took days for a response, then the problem may or may not get fixed. Over the next few months I had to eat crow and tell my clients to move to a new hosting company, sometimes at considerable expense. The last two clients that didn’t move lost complete access to their sites for three weeks this May. One got the data back when the server finally came back online. One didn’t.

A couple of others waited until their sites became unreliable before they moved. Both of those companies rely pretty heavily on their websites for marketing and I had to work long hours to get their sites up and running quickly on new servers.

Fortunately in all these cases I had kept their sites backed up. Unless I had a service contract, the backups might not have been totally current, but the sites were up and functioning again within a day or two.

Again, do you have current backups of your site?

Static websites

If your site is built with static web pages your FTP program should make it easy to synchronize your site between the webserver and your own computer. Instant backup. If you dig around a bit you might even figure out how to make the program run syncs automatically at regularly scheduled times. The better Mac FTP programs like Yummy FTP, Transmit, Interarchy and Captain FTP can all do this. I’m sure there are others that do so too.

For even more backup peace of mind you might even make another copy of your site on a CD or external hard drive. For the truly pranoid, store that copy in a different location than your Mac. Or, considering the chaos that Hurricane Katrina caused, that isn’t all that paranoid. Maybe store your site on another web host or backup service.

Dynamic Sites

If you run a blog or a content management system backing up is more complex. Since most of the content for your site will be stored in a database your site can’t just be copied in one server and placed in another. You will have to keep copies of the CMS software, the database files and any media, including images, Flash, MP3s etc.. These are the building blocks from which you will have to re-assemble your site.

The template and media files are easy. Haul out your trusty FTP client and go. Your database will require a bit more effort.

MacTheWeb runs on WordPress. Thanks to Skippy.net, there are plugins available that make backing up my database automatic. I use the aptly named WordPress Database Backup Plugin along with WP-Cron. The backups get gziped and emailed to a Gmail account.

Many of the more popular CMS’s and blogging systems have similar plugins or modules. If yours does, do yourself a huge favor and use it.

If you don’t have an automated solution at hand all is not lost. Your web host probably has a copy of phpMyAdmin installed. If it doesn’t, install it yourself. It is no more difficult than getting your CMS up and running.

phpMyAdmin gives you a graphical front end to your MySQL database. Exporting your db is only a matter of a few clicks. Unfortunately, phpMyAdmin does not have any automation features built in. So make a recurring iCal or Entourage entry to remind you to do regular backups.

If your web host allows you to do chron jobs and you know how to do so, bless you. Write yourself a script and automate your backups. I’ve managed to bungle through and do it once but wouldn’t care to attempt to coach anybody else through it. My UNIX skills are too rudimentary. That’s why I use backup plugins now.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 12:04 am and is filed under Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.