[Nathan]

This month seems to be a bad one for a few major sites that experienced problems due to inadequate backup regiments. One of the registrars that I use, after considerable downtime, had to restore from a day old backup due to a hardware failure. This is a very long interval for a registrar (everything did eventually get resolved with them). This week a very large forum is having problems after their backups were compromised in an attack. They're now running on a 5 month old archive, with uncertainty whether they can retrieve the latest copy.

This has encouraged me to look at my own backup procedures, and share some crucial steps with you. While you may not run a registrar or a multi-million post forum, no one wants to loose their work. Use your discretion; judge based on the size and frequency of change of your site.

If you're on shared hosting, some of this may be your provider's responsibility. Nonetheless, never take a risk and rely completely on someone else to protect your data!

The basics:

• Never work directly on FTP. Keep at least one local copy and back it up.
  
• Backup your databases frequently (I've seen someone with a day old backup of their forum script, but a month old backup of its DB).
  
• Occasionally make a hard copy archive of your backups (CD, DVD, USB Drive, etc)
  
• Backups should not be stored on machines that can be easily accessed via the Internet

More Advanced:

• Continuous Data Protection may be worthwhile to sites with rapidly changing content
  
• Tape Drives are a very reliable way to archive large amounts of data
  
• Use RAID 1 (drive mirroring) to protect against hard drive failures

Don't forget security! Keep your scripts and software up to date on both your production server and backup machines. S.M.A.R.T. is a good way to help anticipate drive failures, possibly allowing you to make that last minute backup (every HDD will fail eventually).

Restoring your Backups

Now before you go ahead and start making backups of everything, make sure you know how to restore them. Is your DB too big to upload via phpMyAdmin? If so, do you have access to SSH to restore it, or will you need a script like BigDump? Are you backing up correctly? Do they contain all of the required data? If possible, try restoring your backups somewhere at least once. You don't want to find yourself with useless backups, if you ever need to use them.

Copyright 2009 Nathan LaPierre.

[newb]

back ups are important, got it.

ps i never knew u ran a registrar

[Nathan]

newb, on Mar 24 2009, 08:52 PM, said:

ps i never knew u ran a registrar

I don't, I mean one of the registrars that I use

[newb]

Nathan, on Mar 24 2009, 06:55 PM, said:

I don't, I mean one of the registrars that I use

oh, ok

[pecky]

Ooh i read their story - i feel sorry for them

Shall back up

[uzi.boy]

5 month old archive?! Harsh, it's like losing a bunch of your memories...

Well, I don't have anything worth backing up currently. But I shall play around with it when I get time.

[eloraby]

very good advice, you never know the importance of a backup until you need it
I had a previous crisis when my web host decided to suddenly shut down, and they left me with nothing. They just disappeared.
I had to re enter alot of the content, and not everything was restored.

[tru3existence]

okay.. must backup xD

[Darkneo]

I remember one forum i used to be at, they had to go back to a three year old database backup. I was still a member but most of the important stuff was gone

[chauser]

YAh..backup is important atleast twice in a week or if your lazy once like what I did.lol...neva rely on your server coz there's nothing in this world 100% perfect..