Back That Thang Up!

 

Pay attention. What I say next may very well save your blogging career.

If you don’t have a trusted, scheduled back up of your blog or website going right now, stop whatever you’re doing and set one up. 

This is a practice I suggest to everyone, but very few people take the tips (even me, actually). I recently had a blog corrupted by a mysterious, devilish force and unfortunately for me, I didn’t have back-ups in place. The long story, short of this situation was that I lost about 2 years worth of content and writings.

Gone.

Just, gone.

If I had regular blog back-ups in place, I might have only lost a week or two or nothing at all. But I did, and now I’m spending hours working through corrupted file code to salvage anything that be saved.

I would prefer that you not go through the same thing.

How To Set Up A Back-Up

This is not going to be a long post because I want you to spend the time you would normally spend reading and analyzing my every word setting up a back-up system for the blog you work on and care about.

There are plenty of ways to set up a back-up plan for your blog but here are a few of mine.

1) WP Time Machine - This is a great plug-in that not only backs up your WP files and content, but it will then turn around and store them on Dropbox, Amazon’s S3 system or your FTP host. It’s a pretty simple set-up process and will save you much heartache down the road.

2) Backuper - This is another plug-in, but this one has handy features that let you customize not only how the back-up saves, but how often. Choose between Weekly, Daily, Hourly and more to feel as safe as you need.

3) Host cPanel - Most of the time your hosting service will have back-up options in the cPanel. Spend some times familiarizing yourself with the cPanel and set up and sort of minimal back-up that is allowed.

4) Manual Save - If all those options seem too complicated, you can always set up a calendar alert once a month, week, day, etc to remind you to go into your FTP host, download all the files, compress them in a zip folder and save them in a designated space on your harddrive.

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Okay, stop reading, start saving your blogs and the hard work you’ve put in.

Go.