Comments on: The importance of backing up! http://www.communityspark.com/power-outage/ Community Building Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:46:18 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: What are your contingency plans? » Online Community Building http://www.communityspark.com/power-outage/comment-page-1/#comment-2057 What are your contingency plans? » Online Community Building Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:00:19 +0000 http://www.communityspark.com/power-outage/#comment-2057 [...] few months ago, I wrote about the importance of backing up your site so that should your hosting fail, you have a copy of your site to restore. This article [...] [...] few months ago, I wrote about the importance of backing up your site so that should your hosting fail, you have a copy of your site to restore. This article [...]

]]> By: Always keep your software ‘kind of’ updated » Community Building Blog http://www.communityspark.com/power-outage/comment-page-1/#comment-1176 Always keep your software ‘kind of’ updated » Community Building Blog Sat, 19 May 2007 11:42:09 +0000 http://www.communityspark.com/power-outage/#comment-1176 [...] I think we lost around 100,000 posts and 1,000 members overnight. Of course, I had no backups either at that time. Don’t repeat my mistake - keep on top of security upgrades and always keep backups. [...] [...] I think we lost around 100,000 posts and 1,000 members overnight. Of course, I had no backups either at that time. Don’t repeat my mistake – keep on top of security upgrades and always keep backups. [...]

]]> By: Tom http://www.communityspark.com/power-outage/comment-page-1/#comment-8 Tom Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:28:53 +0000 http://www.communityspark.com/power-outage/#comment-8 Definitely good advice here. As the weeks, months, and years roll by, it can be all too easy to be lured into a false sense of security. Time passes by without incident; and the need for timely backups becomes apparently less urgent. Daily backups become weekly backups, which over time become monthly backups, and so on. Though you should be making backups more frequently as your community grows, that's not always how it happens in reality. Eventually you may even stop making them entirely. All is well and nothing ever goes wrong anyways, right? This blog entry hits close to home for me. Power outages and server crashes are not the only cases where a recent backup can be a lifesaver. Sometimes complete and utter negligence on the part of your hosting provider gives need for that backup you made last night... You did make a backup last night, right? This is what happened to one of my partner's websites when the host had decided to migrate over to a brand spanking new server... Without making a backup of all of the websites they host. Oh, sure, they had a backup of my partner's website. That backup was over 6 months old. The real loss was not the flatfiles or scripts, which we both had offline backups of ourselves. The real tragedy here was the loss of the database. 6 months of forum posts and member registrations. Our own backup was a few months old itself. It was a harsh lesson to be learned. And the lesson? Always make frequent backups of your databases yourself; never rely on your webhost to do it for you! Definitely good advice here. As the weeks, months, and years roll by, it can be all too easy to be lured into a false sense of security. Time passes by without incident; and the need for timely backups becomes apparently less urgent. Daily backups become weekly backups, which over time become monthly backups, and so on. Though you should be making backups more frequently as your community grows, that’s not always how it happens in reality. Eventually you may even stop making them entirely. All is well and nothing ever goes wrong anyways, right?

This blog entry hits close to home for me. Power outages and server crashes are not the only cases where a recent backup can be a lifesaver. Sometimes complete and utter negligence on the part of your hosting provider gives need for that backup you made last night… You did make a backup last night, right?

This is what happened to one of my partner’s websites when the host had decided to migrate over to a brand spanking new server… Without making a backup of all of the websites they host. Oh, sure, they had a backup of my partner’s website. That backup was over 6 months old.

The real loss was not the flatfiles or scripts, which we both had offline backups of ourselves. The real tragedy here was the loss of the database. 6 months of forum posts and member registrations. Our own backup was a few months old itself. It was a harsh lesson to be learned. And the lesson? Always make frequent backups of your databases yourself; never rely on your webhost to do it for you!

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