Last week we looked at the benefits, indeed the necessity, of making regular backups of your site. This week we cover some more detailed advice on the whens and hows involved.

Where Should I Keep My Backups?

There are three basic choices for where you might store your backed-up site; some are better than others:

1. Somewhere on your Web server
2. On another Web server/in the cloud
3. On your own computer/thumb drive/external hard drive

The weakness of option #1 is that if your site has been hacked, compromised, or otherwise obliterated, your backups will be gone too. This is like making only one copy of your will, and storing it in a different room in your house than the original. If your house gets blown away in a tornado, both copies of the will are gone. For that reason, we strongly recommend against relying on your server alone to store your backups.

Option #2 is better, but still a little dicey if you rely on that solution by itself. It’s true that the world is heading more and more toward cloud computing (witness Adobe’s “Creative Cloud” product line, Google Drive, and others) – but, there’s always the question of where exactly are those files? Not to mention, who owns them, and who has access to them? If the stars align just wrong, you could find yourself with no functioning site, and no access to your backup.

We recommend that whatever you do, you always keep a hard copy of your backup on your own computer or external drive. It’s completely separate from your server, and there’s no question of ownership or access. You might combine #2 and #3: schedule backups to be dumped to the cloud somewhere, and then go in and download the backup to your own device, for example. Some good cloud providers include Dropbox, Amazon S3, and SugarSync.

How Often Should I Make Backups?

Generally, any time you make a major change. Whenever you make a new blog post, add a new product/category, or make any other substantial change to your site, making a backup afterward will prevent you having to duplicate that effort if you later need to restore your site.

At MWD Web, as an example, we add a new blog post every Friday. At 9 am sharp, that post is up online, crisp and clean and new. Our backup, then, runs every Friday at 10 am. This way, we’re covered in case anything should break.

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There you have it. We’ve taken a pretty quick and cursory overview of backing up your site, but hopefully we’ve armed you with enough knowledge to start protecting yourself, if you’re not currently. If you haven’t done any backing up yet, hopefully we’ve convinced you of just how important it is!

Photo Credit: Nedko via Compfight cc