Why Website Backups are Critical to Your Company

By: Wildfire Marketing Group Content Distribution Team Click author's name for more of his/her articles

One thing most web site owners have little time for is...anything! Anything other than focusing on their website content and the business or service it supports and the information it provides, that is. That means that administration is often lacking, as it frequently must – after all, there are only so many hours in a day.

But the one thing that you should never ignore are backups. They are like insurance. You rarely need it (you hope), but when you do, you need it very badly.

Conducting regular backups - and testing them - doesn't have to be a lot of work. With a small bit of forethought and effort and they can be automated to a high degree. And, they should be tested from time to time. Even when a backup appears to have gone flawlessly, the only way to know whether it worked properly is to try to restore the information. If it can't be restored, the backup is worthless.

Even when the web hosting company provides the service, there still will be some planning involved for you. Hosting companies often rely on one or both of two methods; they backup everything (called a full backup), or backup anything which has changed since the last full backup (called an incremental backup).

Of critical importance are any configuration files that have been tailored. For example, if you've modified the standard installation of a software application, you want to be able to recapture or reproduce those changes without starting over. Network configuration files, modifications to HTML files, CSS style sheets, Java Script files and others fall into the same category.

If you have XML files, databases, spreadsheets or any other files that carry product, subscriber information or order history, for example, they should get special attention. They are critical to your business. Lose them and you must start from scratch. That can have a huge negative impact on your site that can last quite a while.

It should go without saying that all HTML and related web site files that create visible pages should be backed up often. It isn't necessary to record every trivial modification, fortunately you can tailor backup software to exclude specific files or folders. Usually they're so small that it isn't worth the trouble, but in some scenarios it can add up when there are many thousands of files.

Here again, the backups are worthless if they can't be used. Even if the hosting company charges for doing so, it's important to test at least once or twice a year to make sure the data can be restored. That's especially true of database backups, which often involve special software and routines. Database files have a special structure and the information is related in certain ways that require backups be done differently.

Developing a backup plan can be straightforward. Start simply and review your plan from time to time, revising it as your site evolves and grows. The day will come when a hard drive fails, you get hacked, attacked by a virus, or you accidentally delete something important. When that day comes, the time you spent developing and executing a backup plan will save you days or weeks of effort and more importantly, save you from lost revenue.

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