How to Back Up Your Blog the Right Way

How to Back Up Your Blog the Right Way?

I’ve been backing up my blog for several years now, and I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was doing things the way I should be doing them. I thought I was going to recover my website should anything bad happen.

Well, guess what? My website got hacked. It was so bad that all subdirectories got wiped clean. I stored all sorts of data online, and no such luck there either. All my stored data just got nuked.

Now, I had this sense of confidence because, at the back of my head, I knew that my host was supposed to be backing up all my online properties. Well, pay attention to the phrase “supposed to be.” Well, it turns out, horrors of horrors, that they were doing no such thing.

To make matters worse, it was completely my problem. I dropped the ball. Why? When I log in to my cPanel or main control panel for all my online properties at my hosting company, I failed to read the backup policy completely. It turns out that the company would back up only once every blue moon. Also, there are strict storage limitations to how much they can back up.

Now, as you can well imagine, when you add these two factors together, they all spell out the very clear message that I was up a river with no paddle. I was out of luck.

So you can’t even imagine how depressed I got. You can’t even imagine how many buckets of tears I had to cry because I poured my life onto those websites, and worse yet, that’s how I made my living. All those thousands of dollars, and I’m talking about five figures here every single month, went up in digital smoke.

I’m sharing this pathetic experience with you to highlight the fact that backing up your blog is no small thing. You may be thinking that’s it’s already happening. You may be thinking that you may have signed up to some sort of automatic backup system at your host. Well, you might want to look into that more deeply.

You might want to look at the details. You might want to check out the scheduling. Most importantly, pay attention to the actual backup that you get because it may well turn out that you’re a day late and a buck short.

That’s exactly what happened with me. At the back of my mind, I was always thinking to myself, well, they’re always backing up. So, sure enough, when I tried to unpack the backup, it was a very old version of my website, so I was completely helpless.

Those old versions of the websites are completely useless because I wouldn’t make money off my sites using that information. Do you see how this works out? Do you see how painful it is? Don’t let yourself become a victim because this is precisely what can happen to you if you just trust the blog backup system of your hosting company.

Regardless of the particular web hosting service you sign up with, make sure that their backup system meets your needs. Don’t let them sales talk you into all sorts of foolishness. You don’t have time for that.

Ask them, point blank, “This is all the content I have, this is all my online properties, this is the stuff that makes me money, are you sure that if something happens, regardless of magnitude and regardless of timing, that I will get my stuff back up immediately? Not tomorrow, not next week, but right now.”

Next, ask them if you can get the latest version of your site. If they try to dance around you or try to blow smoke your way, look for professional backup service.

I know that this is going to add another extra layer of cost, but guess what? You only have one chance to make money on the internet, and if you screw up with a bad back up, then it probably will take a long time for you to get all that money back. So do yourself a big favor and commit to backing up your blog the right way.