If you blog a lot, you must already knew that your biggest asset in your blog is your blog post.

Thoughtful, unique blog posts you wrote are great asset of yours – if not now, they will be it in the near future – trust me :)

Not only your blog post – of course, if you custom design your blog design or at least tweak a free blog theme, then your blog design is a considerable asset, too.

The question – are you protecting your asset as well as you thought?

The reality is quite painful

You’ve heard how experts insist you to backup your blog often. I knew I heard them, but unfortunately, mediocre protection measures will always mean moderate risks of losing important information – in blogs case, your blog posts and design.

No matter how knowledgeable you are in backing up your blog, when the reality hits you, it is quite painful to experience :)

My failure, your lesson

The case study of the importance of backing up your data is – me.

I back up regularly every month – the database, the design, everything. Moreover, the web hosts backup my data automatically on weekly basis.

However, it turned out that monthly and weekly automatic back up is not enough.

My situation – one of my web hosting account is experiencing an outage. It was an outage that last for a day, and rarely happens in the past.

The cause of the outage is hardware failures – everything back to normal a day later, with the brand new hardware installed.

However, here came the headache.

My web host only restored from the automatic backup, and that meant my web properties’ information after the last automatic backup was deleted!

It was a force majeure, but it was indeed disheartening.

I lost 1 whole blog with 5 unique posts, while my other blogs lost dozens of original posts I’ve written in the past week.

Ouch.

How NOT to be a noob in backing up your blog

Here’s the lesson learned from my last ‘gig’:

• Backup your database each time you finish posting for the day – if this is a hassle, back up your database bi-weekly and your each post on a .txt file every time you post an article.
• Backup your site each time you make any changes, or schedule it for bi-weekly back up.
• You can backup manually, but if you are using Wordpress, find and install a plugin that automate your backup process – or at least, backup your files by the press of a button.
• If you can’t do-it-yourself your backup, hire a techie.
• Last but not least, partner with web hosting service provider that are well-known for strong services and quality – because even the best can’t guarantee 100% up time, naturally!

I learn my lesson, and hopefully you learn BEFORE the unfortunates hit your blogs or other web properties.

Ivan Widjaya
Blog backup noob

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