It’s Sunday night. All is quiet on the Web front. Your site is humming along, bringing you business and making you money.

But then suddenly, your business partner calls in a panic. The site is down, and no one can place any orders. Your customers are going elsewhere, and your business is losing thousands of dollars.

Monday morning, your Web developer looks at your files, and the news is not good. Not only did your site fall victim to a particularly nasty hack, but all of your files have been corrupted. What’s worse, your blog and online catalog have also vanished. All that content you’ve spent the last few years building up; all those products you painstakingly put up for sale; everything is gone forever.

Your Web developer has the original files, so all is not lost; but, where you once had a hundred indexed pages and posts, now you’re back to five, and you have to rebuild your catalog from scratch. If only you could turn back time and recover your site from before it was hacked…

Sorry for any cold sweats or heart palpitations we just induced, but we wanted to call attention to just how important it is to be on top of things with your site. The scenario we just described has, unfortunately, happened to real people like you in the past.

To safeguard against this kind of nightmare happening to you, we have three simple words of advice:

Back everything up.

It’s essential to keep a complete backup of your site. This includes HTML files, images, and every database that’s tied into your site. With a solid backup, you can easily get your site back up and running the way it was before disaster struck.

Some Web hosts provide this service, but not all. Even those that do might not keep a record of everything, and they might not back things up frequently enough to ensure that all your latest changes are preserved.

The best advice, then, is to either engage your Web developer to make those backups for you, or figure it out yourself. If, for example, you have a WordPress site, there are a few plugins available that will do this for you.

Whoever makes the backup, in the end you should have a zip file containing the entire contents of your site.

Next week we’ll explore some best practices about managing those backups.

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