Backing up your website

With the events at DistributeIT making news all over Australia and within most news mediums including TV, I thought it would be good time to remind you of how important it is to have a local backup or offsite backup of your website.

The hacks on DistributeIT’s ‘Drought’, ‘Hurricane’, ‘Blizzard’ and ‘Cyclone’ servers has meant that 4800 websites have been lost forever. These are websites of all types of businesses who rely on their online presence to run or promote their business. Along with the loss of the websites and associated files is the loss of the backups preventing these businesses from restoring versions of their website from a week or even a month ago.

The loss of the backups is really the critical thing here. If you could at least go back a month you could make-up on lost posts/articles and even product updates. It might take you a few long days but you could recover. However with the loss of the backups, unless an offsite backup is kept (which DistributeIT didn’t) by you the website owner, then everything is lost.

“I think I’m in shock … I have lost everything …. I couldn’t possibly replicate all those years of work again … my whole life’s work has gone down the drain,” wrote one.

This seems almost too hard. If you are running a small business then having to also consider offsite backups of your website files can be another one of those tasks that never makes it on to the production line.

However I bet many business owners upon reading the articles on the data loss and even seeing TV/News coverage would have been asking their IT person about what backups are in place, and what contingency do they have in place should their hosting company suffer a similar fate.

The truth is that this was a deliberate attack on DistributeIT and an attack that aimed to really hurt the company and its customers.

So whilst this may or may not be a one off, the lessons are there for all.

There are various ways that you can backup your website. Your hosting company will be undertaking at least weekly backups of your files. I know that HostGator does this for you, however regarding what redundancy it has in place should these and the original files go, I have no idea.

If your hosting provider gives you Control Panel access, you should also be able perform a manual backup of all files.

You can do your backup quite easily. Account backups can be performed using the Control Panel -> Backups functionality for your hosting account. If your account is not too big in size you can perform a full account backup just with one click.

If the account is too large for the full automatic backup the files and the databases should be backed up separately. In this case you would need to know what your web site consists of and thus what should be backed up/restored. Usually sites are composed of files and databases. You must take care of them all if you want to have your site exactly the way it has been before.

This is the screen you are moved to in order to perform a full backup. You can usually nominate to have the hosting provider email you when the files are ready.

Once the files are ready, you can then click on the file that is generated and download it locally. In HostGator’s case, these files can’t be used to restore to HostGator, they can only be used to transfer the files to a new hosting provider. I suspect that this might not be the case with all hosting providers.

Control Panel also provides you with a Backup Wizard function. This can be used to also do a backup (what is shown above) as well as a restore.

An alternative approach is to use an FTP tool to make a local copy of the files. In order to backup your files, download all the files from your public_html folder to your computer by using your favourite FTP client. After that you can easily upload the files to your hosting account and your website will be restored.

Once the files are stored locally, make sure you keep a copy offsite so that should everything fail, you have something to turn to.

If you are using a blogging platform like WordPress you can install a plug-in to help you back your files and databases up. There are lots of them out there. Look through the various forums to find what people recommend. Usually the ones with the most downloads have received the most testing. You should be able to also configure the download of this file to your desktop. Once you have done this then use an online backup service such as Carbonite to back these files up.

Other than what is provided via a WordPress plugin, everything listed above is very manual. There are also tools that you can install on your server that can help you to perform automatic backups of your files.

There are ways to prevent these disasters and whilst you would expect that your hosting provider will take care of it, sometimes it can actually be beyond their own capabilities.