Poll: Do you have a disaster plan for your Web site data?
Thursday October 25, 2007
I have a lot of friends and colleagues who live in Southern California, and so disasters are on my mind at the moment. While losing your house is a lot more traumatic than losing your Web site, for some people this can be the difference between having a company and not having one. Do you backup your Web data? If you do, have you tested that the restore function works? And what about your hosting provider, do they have a plan in place to stay up and running in the event of a disaster?
Do you have a disaster plan for your Web site data? Remember, you can only vote once, so please read all the choices before you click one.
I always keep a copy of current files for each website in its own folder on my computer, and sometimes masters on CDROM. However, recently the web host I was using for one of my sites crashed suddenly and has taken months to rebuild their hosting site. We had to move to a different host, but the files were easy to restore on the new host’s site. We were up and running again quickly with my back-ups.
I work alone for myself and have about 34 web clients whose sites reside on my computer, for design, and then are posted to the hosting provider. I routinely put a copy of all work on my second computer and every two weeks copy my entire data drive to CD. Clients files are also kept on individual client CDs. So at any one time there are at least 3 copies of every site, plus what’s on the server. It may seem a bit excessive, that is until the host crashes and you become very grateful for the redundant copies.
Ai yai yai, as Ricky Ricardo would say to Lucy. Didn’t think of that. Like Paul I am solo but have relied on others for data backup and rescue. If the company that designed my site and or the host ever crashed I’d be up that well known creek in a leaky canoe. Now that you mention it I should ask them all what data backup procedure they have on my files. Jeez, I wrote all the content I know I have it – but scattered all over my computer. Gotta fix that. Meanwhile, I need a new companion site and am currently learning html through About.com to design and maintain it myself. So backing up data and keeping orderly files will be my priority as I go forward. Thanks so much for the heads up. Oh, and would taking a snapshot of all my current web pages and keeping them in a special folder make sense?