Is Your Website Truly Backed Up?

If you want to play it safe with your business's online livelihood, then taking the proper steps to back up your website is the best practice when a worst-case scenario takes place.

With computer preparedness in mind, here are a handful of ways your business can back up its digital assets, most notably your website:

Importance of Backing up Your Website

Alongside the peace of mind it provides, there are a number of reasons your business should regularly backup its website.

For starters, if and when your website does crash, having a backup allows you to get up and running again quickly, which decreases loss of income and customer inconvenience.

A backup also gives your website something to fall back on if it's ever infected by a virus.

In addition, the majority of website host providers don't provide backups for your website.

With the number of changes a website goes through regularly, having a backup process you control will help your business avoid a digital disaster.

Cloud Backups

One of the most popular website backup options is the cloud.

Businesses everywhere are turning to cloud storage as a hassle-free way to back up their website.

As the following article looks at, in terms of the 5 best practices for network configuration backups, the cloud has plenty of storage solutions to choose from. 

Whether you want to manually backup your website to the cloud or choose software and third-party plug-ins that automate the process for you, the cloud is compatible with most systems.

Likewise, the cloud was built on redundancy, which makes it perfect for backing up even the smallest website changes on a regular basis.

Manual Approach

Many business owners choose to back up their websites manually using file transfer protocol. Using the manual approach ensures website files are backed up to the correct location on time.

If you choose the manual backup approach, then it's important to set daily or weekly reminders to do so. Besides, skipping one backup could undo all of your hard work.

Additionally, make sure you back up your databases as well. And, as always, back up your website to a minimum of two hard drive locations in case one fails during the recovery process.

Automated Solutions

If you're too busy to back up your website on a regular basis, then you might want to consider automated backups. There are a growing number of website backup services available that take care of the process for you.

You can choose the weekly or monthly dates you'd like a backup to take place and the service provider will take care of the rest.

Many backup services use sophisticated software that detect website changes and backup the information automatically when a change takes place.

Backup Types

Whether you choose to back up your website manually, automatically through a service provider, or through a cloud plug-in, it's important to know the different backup types: full, differential, and incremental.

Simply put, a full back up completely backs up your entire website, which allows for a more thorough recovery.

A differential backup creates copies of only the files that have changed since the last full backup, which cuts down on backup time.

An incremental backup works much the same way, except it only backs up data changes from the most recent full backup.

When you're ready to truly protect your website data, keep in mind the backup options above.