Do you backup your site regularly?
Because you should.
Sit right down and let me tell you a tale of the time the backup (or rather, the lack of a backup) ruined my vacation.
Once upon a time, I was an adult counselor at a youth camp. It was a beautiful location – a crystal clear lake with a dirt path all the way around. It was a mile around the lake, and we walked it several times every day. Food was on one side, camp was on the other, and it was a brisk walk every morning. We were surrounded by tall pine trees that scraped the sky, and you could see fish jumping out of the water at dusk and dawn each day.
Heaven.
We were gone for a week, and I had prepped my business to run smoothly while I was away. I let my clients know I’d be out of town, had my VA prepped to handle anything that might come up, and my husband was on standby in case anything went seriously awry.
Well, things went seriously awry.
In the middle of the week, about an hour before we were set to go zip-lining across the lake, I got a phone call.
(Now, before you jump to conclusions – yes I had my phone. I’m a mom. Of course I had my phone. 🙂 Ok, back to story time.)
I got a panicked phone call. My sweet husband, in his calm bedside manner voice, called and informed me one of my clients was having trouble because their site got hacked and they didn’t know what to do.
So, I stopped what I was doing, found a quiet place, and started making phone calls.
I learned a few things about the site in question:
- It hadn’t been updated in months
- It hadn’t been backed up since I had created the site (and many changes had happened since then!)
- It was on shared hosting, and the attack had affected every other site on the shared hosting account
It took a few hours, but the whole mess got sorted out. I called my hosting provider, had my husband and VA conferenced into the call (because I didn’t have a computer in the middle of the woods), and it was eventually resolved.
But I learned the importance of backups that day.
Most of the time backups are a simple step in the process. Backup a site before updating. Backup a site after big changes. Backup a site if you blog regularly. Basic stuff, backups you’ll probably never need.
Unless you do.
Here’s my plea:
Backup your site. Please.
Back it up often and “just in case”… because there will be a case eventually. It may not be you affected, but what if it is? Wouldn’t life be so much better if you just had the backup ready to go?
Yes. Yes it would.
It may even save your vacation.
