Blah, Blah, Blog

Well I didn’t quite make my 30 posts in 30 days challenge, but I came pretty close, plus I had 2 good excuses: 4 kids sick with the virus du jour who, in their usual fashion, become ill one at a time instead of all together (not yet sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing!). I’ll spare you the gory details, let’s just say I’ve been hip deep in laundry for days and am having sympathy nausea. Not pretty.

Also, my laptop hard drive decided to take a nosedive, so my computer has been in the shop for over a week which seriously limits my internet activity to say the least! I’m back with a new computer, but I am SO thankful that I performed a system backup just days before! I talked about this here. You know, it’s funny how my brain had been nudging me towards doing a backup and that little voice kept niggling at me until I did it. I’m so thankful because all I had to do was download all my files from Mozy! I don’t know how many hours/days/weeks this has saved me, I’m just glad I did it.

A couple of weeks ago I shared that I have gotten serious about doing website and database backups. In addition to using CPSite Saver to backup my cpanel hosted websites and databases, I also found this cool little tool called Mozy.

Mozy, for just a few bucks a month, backs up your hard drive. How many files do you have on your computer that would cost you lost of time and money to retrieve if you had a system failure? (Or in my case, a 16 month old who can’t keep her hands off my desk, lol!) You probably have ebooks, articles, reports, audios, etc… and your CPSiteSaver files too!

Of course, you could burn all this stuff to a disk, but then you would have to worry about where to store it. With Mozy, you just double click on the icon anytime you want to do a backup (or you can schedule them to be done automatically), and all your data is saved to a safe offsite location.

You can learn more about Mozy by clicking HERE.

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t help myself.

I promised to come back today and tell you about the tools I’m using to protect my online business. Well the first one is a program that does manual or automatic backups of your cpanel sites and databases. It was inexpensive and easy to set up, even for a nontechie like myself. It saves the files to your own computer, which you can then download to a CD or portable zip drive or external hard drive, take your pick, for further insurance. If you’re forgetful, that’s ok. You can set it up to backup your sites automatically whenever you want it to so you can set it and forget it.

It’s called CPanel Site Saver and I just finished using it to perform backups on all my cpanel hosted sites (which thankfully includes all but one… I’m off to figure out how to backup the remaining one now) and boy do I feel better about my websites now!

I’m copying and pasting an article below on the importance of backups, hopefully you’ll feel motivated to do this too. Sleep better in 2007 knowing that your assets are safe.

“Website backups – why important?”

Website backups are not one of the most important tasks to the busy webmaster. They are ignored as if there is no benefit for taking the time to do the process to backup website files.

When you look at it in a different angle, however, website backups are the most critical of all website files. Why? Because this is your insurance against disasters!

Imagine what you will do without website backup files? What will you restore without website backups? Are you willing to redo everything again?

If you own static webpages, website backups may not be that important since you have the files on your local drives. But if you have a dynamic website driven by scripts like PHP and Perl, then you won’t be able to get all the pages for restore when problems occurs.

Also, if you don’t have website backups, all the updates there that you might have done online will not be saved as well. You will end up re-doing everything again and again.

This is the main reason that we recommend that all webmasters maintain website backups as updated as possible to avoid headaches in the future. You as a webmaster will not be able to encounter the heartaches and pains of losing your website not to mention the time and money to redo everything.

Backup your website files. Its a basic task but the most important that you should not forget as long as you are a webmaster.

Hope this helps. Go here to get CPanel Site Saver