Why are website backups important? You can learn the easy way or the hard way. I recommend the easy way.
So, I have to tell on myself.
I manage quite a few different websites. One day last week, I noticed that the header of one of the websites I manage was not quite right. A glitch, bug, or action had misaligned the header. I didn’t notice it after I worked on it because, when I looked at the site, it looked fine. But since I didn’t clear my cache the misalignment issue didn’t show up right away for me.
I decided to fix it by going to one of my backup files. The glorious thing about the website backup program I use is that it’s visual–each backup is represented by an image. You can see the date and the image of the website from that date. This allows you to easily identify and choose the version you want to go back to.
I found the exact day that the mistake was introduced, went back to the previous day, and used that version to backup the site. Such a relief that I didn’t have to go on a deep dive to debug the code! I just went to the backup and installed it. This experience was great reminder to me that taking the extra step to set up regular daily backups is totally worth it.
Need more reasons?
If my story isn’t enough reason to convince you to have automated daily website backups, here’s a great article from 2019 titled, “10 Reasons It’s Important to Perform a Website Backup” that may seal the deal. It has a great list of reasons why you should be backing up regularly.
Reason #3, in particular, stands out to me. Hard drive crashes. Have you ever had a hard drive crash? I have. Did I have a backup at the time? NO. That totally stunk and I lost a lot of data that was important, mostly family pictures that were irreplaceable. So Julie and I decided to pay hundreds of dollars to try and recover the data. Fortunately the company we hired was able to recover the data for us, but it was a very expensive lesson.
Now I have multiple redundancies on all of our personal computers and cell phones to make sure we don’t lose any precious data. Backing up never seemed that important–until I lost all of those wonderful family memories (thankfully, only temporarily lost). Even though this is rare, it can happen on web servers as well. It’s best to have a backup just in case!
What now?
Managing website backups can be tricky. Figuring out which backup solution works well can be time consuming as there are tons of options. And backing up is only half of the equation. Knowing how to restore the backup is the other half. If you’re going to be doing this yourself, you need to know how to execute a restore should you ever need it.
Restoring can be complicated and confusing. Not sure which backup program to use? Or do you just want someone to manage this for you? Julie and I can help! We’ve set them up multiple times and we’ve restored websites many times before too. Let us help you have some peace of mind! Allowing us to manage it for you is a great inexpensive way to do that. Want help? Fill out our form here.
