Backups are crucial for your website’s continued availability. They act as a final safety net for your site if everything else goes wrong. Even if you implement the best security measures, a virus or hacker can get through and cause havoc on your site. Also, drive failure or human error can lead to loss of essential files, taking your site down. However, if you have the latest working copy of your website backed up, then you can restore its services in no time. Today, we are going to offer some tips to help you frame a backup strategy for your website.
1. Location of the backup
When you plan a backup for your website, it is essential to save it on a server different than the one where your website resides. It ensures that if your server gets infected, your backup doesn’t get destroyed too. Many hackers look for backup copies and delete them after gaining unauthorized access to your site. Apart from security risks, backups also help protect you against hardware failures. If your web server crashes and data becomes non-retrievable, having a backup stored on another device can be handy. Use the right tools to back up your website at a separate location.
2. Automated backup process
Automation is a way to guarantee that a process runs at a specific time, after a particular interval without fail. The problem with taking manual backups is that other important tasks can take up your time and leave you with an outdated copy of the backed up data. If something is to go wrong during this time, you could lose valuable data. Hence, try to automate the backup by using feature-packed tools like CodeGuard for websites.
3. Back up your backups
How much safety is enough? Honestly, there is no limit to ensuring the security of your data. We are not asking you to be paranoid, but what if your backup copy gets corrupted? You would never know unless you try to restore it after a disaster. By then, it will be too late to do anything. Hence, we always recommend site owners to take at least one backup of your backup copy. Remember, data doesn’t exist unless you have at least two copies of it [Schofield’s Second Law of Computing].
4. Test your backup copy intermittently
Finally, you must ensure that the backup and restore process works efficiently. Use a test domain and restore the backup copy to test if all site functionalities and data are in place. It is a crucial step to ensure that when disaster strikes, the backed up copy will run perfectly fine.
Summing Up
While most people understand the importance of backups for their websites, they tend to opt for the default backup service provided by the web host. While this is a good option, the host will save the backup on the same server or infrastructure as your website.
Hence, it is crucial to take control of the backup process and use tools like CodeGuard to automate your site backups and store them at a separate location. CodeGuard follows a detailed backup process that ensures not only automated backups but also regular tracking of changes to back them up.
Remember, backups are your final line of defense against any online threat or hardware malfunction. Strategize well. Good Luck!
