You just put made some great changes that you’re happy with to your site. You walk away grab a drink, maybe take a break. When you get back to your computer you find all of your work is lost. A bleak feeling of discouragement swells up inside you . . . What could you have done differently? Back up your site! It is one of the most important things you can do as it can save you a lot of time, money, and heartache.

What?

The best way to get started in understanding our topic is asking. “What does ‘backing up your site’ even mean?”

Firstly, each website is simply a folder with multiple files that make up your site and in turn portions of files can be deleted, lost, altered, or saved! Now backing up your website entails taking that folder filled with all the files making up your website and making a copy. Once that copy is made then it is saved to a separate location that you can access whenever any issues show up with your website!

When?

Lots of backup services actually perform backups automatically for you based on a schedule you can input. Such as a daily backup or weekly backup. It can be hard to determine what you need for your site and how best you can protect it. One thing that is recommended is every time you are going to make a bigger change or finish making a bigger change take a backup of your site. SAVE YOUR WORK!

Where?

With backups you can save to multiple different locations. You can place your files on your local computer which is recommended. You can store them in dropbox, google drive, email, your server (some hosts do not allow you to store backups on their server), and your hosting company will also store a backup of your site on occasion.

Why?

A huge question people can have is why would I waste the space to have my files on my computer?  We’ve gone over this one a little bit throughout this post trying to instill the importance of saving your site in multiple locations. Extra copies of your site means if you et hacked, malware, or break something you can restore a working functional version of your site. The real question isn’t why back up your site it should be why wouldn’t you backup your site?

How?

There are multiple ways to do just that, sometimes your hosting company even offers a way to backup all your files. You can use a plugin to make backups for a WordPress site. You can use FTP(File Transfer Protocol) to make a backup of your files. When it comes to protecting and saving your site you’ll want to make sure you are backing up your site.

The following links are for backups based on your site building platform;

WordPress – https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups

Drupal – https://www.drupal.org/project/backup_migrate

Joomla – https://docs.joomla.org/Backup_Basics_for_a_Joomla!_Web_Site

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) – Recommended checking with hosting company for preferred methods of backing up your site when using FTP.

Overall take note of how important a backup of your site really is as it can save you time, money, and frustrations. Don’t lose your information just because you didn’t take a couple minutes to create a backup.

Backups save sites!