By Richard Lowe, Jr. / Published on February 15th, 2008 / Computers
months, tweaking it until it looks perfect. You've got great content,
excellent graphics and a wonderful design. Thousands of visitors are
pouring in every day, and you are getting dozens of guestbook entries
all telling you how wonderful you've done and hundreds of emails
praising your good work.
One day you go to access your site and you get an error. Your site
does not respond. You feel a little annoyed and try again a few
minutes later ... your browser still times out. This goes on for
hours and then for a full day. You feel panic rising in your gorge
and your chest tightens up. You haven't slept and your wife is
getting worried.
You've tried over and over to call your host's support number and it
does not pick up. Their website doesn't show any problems ... it's a
weekend so they are all at home watching the game.
Monday comes and you finally get an automated response to one of your
panicky emails. Your host
- has had a hard disk crash and didn't have a backup ...
- or they didn't have any money and closed their doors ...
- or a hacker attacked their site and wiped out all of the files
- or your made a mistake with FTP and accidentally deleted all your
work
- or the host got hit by the dreaded xyz virus ...
- or "fill in the blank"
And you didn't have a backup of your site.
I have even read report about one user who had over a gigabyte on his
website of years of hard work with no backup of his own. His host
decided he was getting too much traffic and simply deleted his site.
The poor guy and to send a note to everyone on his email list begging
people to check their browser cache's to see if they could send him
the graphics and pages ... it took six months but he rebuilt his site
(and now he has a backup).
The moral of the story ... backup your web site. I don't care whether
you've got it on Homestead, AOL or Addr.com, if you don't make your
own backup you are taking the chance that you could loose all of your
work ... forever.
How do you back up your site? What I do is make sure that I edit my
site on my OWN hard drive, then upload it as I make changes. That way
I always have my own copy (and, of course, I make a backup of that
also). If you don't or can't do that, then just use FTP to copy the
files to your own hard drive once in a while.
If you have no other choice, you can use the "Save As..." functions
to save the graphics and HTML pages. Note that if you do this you
will capture your sites banners also so this is not the preferred
method.
So backup your site. You will be glad that you did.
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This
website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet
profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
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