Are you keeping your website safe? A look at what you can do.

Your business website is a vital tool, it may be the only way you reach out to new customers. What ever role your website takes in your enterprise, it’s very important that you keep copies of the files that makes it work.

What we want is an easy way to create archive files (ZIP files etc) and store them. The last thing we need is a complicated method that you won’t want to do. If it’s time consuming then it will be less likely to get done.

A quick look at the backup process

Backup files contain a collection of files, in our case all website files. I have found that the ZIP file format is very common, it’s able to compress the data so less storage space is required. There are several types of backup  files you may of heard about…

• Full
• Incremental
• Differential

A full backup obviously contains all the files you have selected. However, a storage device with lots of full backups can take quickly fill up.  Incremental and differential are smaller files that contain changed files only and refer back to a full backup. It can make for restoring files much quicker and can take less space.

How often you backup depends on the type of data and how often it changes. A static website that rarely changes may require just a one-off copy made. A blog that changes often may require to be done weekly, if it changes a lot then you can go daily.

Where you store your backup files is also an important consideration. In an ideal world there are three places…

• Local
• storage device
• Offsite

You can store the files locally on your computer, to save space you can store the last 10 backups only. To be extra safe, you can store the files on an external device like a USB hard drive. For offsite, you can transfer the files to a Internet based storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Backing up a WordPress blog

WordPress blogs come in two parts, all the files that make the blog work. The core files and all the themes and plugins. The second part are the posts that are stored in the database server. What we want is a backup file that contains both. I have been testing out ‘BackupWordpress‘ plugin. It’s able to create a backup that contains all the website files and a database file direct from the server.

The backups can be timed at daily, weekly and monthly. There is an option to have them sent as an email, however it may fail as not every website is setup to send large files. Mine is not and I have an error message displayed all the time. Annoying but I will put up with it as I like the features. It also generates a list of backup files stored on the website so you can click to download. Nice and simple.

I currently use DropBox to store files. It creates a folder on your computer that it synchronises with their storage service (commonly called Cloud Storage). What ever I place in that folder on my computer gets copied automatically over.

In my Dropbox folder, I copy over all my backup files. So I make a local copy and a ‘offsite’ copy in one go. I also copy them to my external USB drive for good measure.

This may sound complicated but it’s not really. Once setup things are fairly easy. The plugin sends an email (hopefully with an attachement). Save the file (either from the email or from the plugin page on WordPress) to your local dropbox folder and that’s it.

In my experience, I have found that website files are more likely to get lost on the webserver. No matter how good your web hosts are, corruptions can happen. So it is better to be safe than sorry.