Website Backups and Why You Need to do Them
1. You are cleaning up your discussion forum or message board and accidentally deleted or 'prune' something that you didn't mean to.
2. Your web hosting company goes out of business or sells their business to a company you prefer not to be hosted with.
3. Your site goes down for a few hours or even a day at a time because you host is upgrading and having lots of downtime. Don't think it could happen to you? This happened to me!
4. You work with several people 'live' on a website. They accidentally overwrote your work and you didn't save a copy of the page.
5. You need to put your site back to the way it was before you did anything because after trying to upgrade the software or scripts it's not working right.
6. Your web host holds your site or domain captive. Pending your dispute, you need to setup your site all over again even in another place and domain.
7. Your website gets hacked and everything was deleted. I've experienced this. While not everything was deleted, it was a large enough chunk. Also, in those early days, I had just learned to edit websites live and had no copy on my hard drive.
8. Your web host might keep backups, but they may not be the ones you need. For example I was once working with a site owner who's site I managed and we needed to restore a database. We went to the web host and asked for help. Then we were told the host only had three databases to choose from and not were the one we needed. It was disappointing because they had one that came before the one we needed and one that came after. We had to go with the oldest one and lose a few days worth of content. This could have been avoided if we had done our own backups.
9. While moving web hosts, due to a misunderstanding, the old account was canceled and deleted too early.
10. Your web host reviewed your site and decides you have violated their terms of service and shuts down your account in short notice.
11. You uploaded the wrong site or folder and overwrote the previous one. When using FTP this is pretty easy to do if you have a large list of sites to publish to and you're doing the updating when you're just a bit too tired.
12. You or someone reinstalled FrontPage extensions and now your redirects, error pages, fancy URL's and what not don't work anymore. You see, when you reinstall FrontPage extensions, it re-creates all your .htaccess files. That means, any customizations you had will also be lost.
13. You had custom programming done to your scripts. Your new web master upgraded the script and can't remember where or what all the modifications are. Worst, he/she doesn't know how to re-program those customizations.
14. A hacker inserted malicious code on all your website's pages and you need to rollback to the previous good version.
15. While moving your blog the database wasn't copied and now you can't gain access back into the site.
It's your responsibility to have all the backups you need for your website, don't leave this important task for someone else and 'hope' they do it! Get your websites backed up now and you'll be so happy you did if you ever run into any minor or major problems.
Lynette Chandler helps entrepreneurs leverage readily available technology for their marketing. Learn to apply the power of technology to your marketing
Article Source: GreatArticlesforMoms.com