You’ve got your website nicely setup, a custom theme, lots of content, a nice income coming in everyday without you doing much but still…NO BACKUP! What’s that? I’ve seen that too often and I have to go through the importance of a full backup for your websites! The subject has been covered before, it will be covered in the future but I steel feel like writing about it. It’s my blog after all, you know: if I feel it’s good, I write about it.

Why no backup?

You know you have to, but still you don’t do it! I could go and tell you: “I learned it the hard way, you know. My website got hacked, then I lost everything, blah blah blah”, but you know all that don’t you? It seems like there’s no argument to convince people to backup their website, only a bad experience can convince them. I’ve warned many persons and told them they should do a full backup of their websites just in case something goes wrong but it’s really a low priority until something bad happens. Then at least I can say “I told you”, but it doesn’t help much. Designing a new theme, writing a post or coding a new little tool for your website is always more attracting than making a backup and that’s why most people don’t backup. There’s always something better to do!

It takes 5 mins, once a week

I backup all my stuff once a week, but I must admit I haven’t done it for the past three weeks because I’ve been so busy. What? Too busy? It only takes five minutes, and I wrote a new article everyday in the past three weeks as well as commenting on other blogs and doing some link building. OK, time wasn’t an issue, there was just so many better things to do! You see how we always come to that.

Anyway, the point is that I usually backup once a week and it takes a little 5 minutes. Five minutes per week isn’t that much compared to the time you’ll lose if something goes wrong. I like a new backup every week and I feel it’s the perfect timing. A week of work is the maximum amount of information I feel comfortable loosing without feeling the need to kill myself. How much information is your life worth?

What to backup?

A full backup for me is a backup of the files on my server with a dump of the database as well as an export of my posts via Wordpress. If you’re not running a blog, you simply need to backup the files on your server and your database. There are a lot of ways to do that kind of backup. If you use CPanel with your host, CPanel offers a backup function so you can backup the combination of your database and files (I know I have the old CPanel version, I have to ask for an upgrade…):

And then:

Then, the process will start and you’ll receive a notification via email when the backup is complete. It shouldn’t take too long if you have a relatively small account. Then, when the backup is complete, a single .zip file will be generated with all the information on you host!

Have a blog? At least export your posts!

Let’s say you’re too lazy to backup your stuff and you have a Wordpress blog, please export your posts into XML! Wordpress has a nice little feature that let you export all your posts and comments into a single XML file that can then be imported back into Wordpress. How great is that? It doesn’t backup your theme or anything like that, but a blog is all about content, isn’t it?

Now backup

We spend so many time on our websites, so having a backup is a must! You don’t want to loose everything and start all over again, so take that five minutes now and backup that little gem of yours!