Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

Covering your backend

Do you back up your website? If you're like me and do all your development on a local machine before uploading it to your server, you might think you don't have to. You might also be wrong.

I can think of a number of reasons why what you have locally might not be the same as what you have online. The ones I came up with are:

• Server Logs
  If you're interested in preserving your server logs to see who's been accessing your website and why, you'll want to make backups of these on a regular basis. Of course, most ISP's purge these after a few days anyway, so if you care, you're probably already backing these up.
• Databases
  If you've got data stored in a database created by visitors to your website, this data is obviously generated online and does not exist locally. This certainly needs to be backed up, especially if you're dealing with orders and customer information. Again, however, if you have a database, you're already making backups, right?
• Configuration files
  If you ever edit any configuration files or CGI scripts on your server, than these changes are probably not reflected in the copy you have locally. You'll want a backup of these files too, so you don't have to recreate the work you did setting them up.
• Journal Comments
  If you have an online journal that has comments enabled, then you've got data that exists on your server and not on your local machine. Keep in mind, too, that if you post your entries via a web-based form or via e-mail, you may not have local copies of your own postings.
• Discussion forums
  If your website has a discussion forum or "Bulletin Board System" (as they were called in my day), then all of that discussion and information is only there on your server. Note that these postings may actually be stored in a database rather than in distinct files. Either way, it's probably something of which you want to have a copy.

Now, if you're paying a hosting company, presumably part of what you're paying for is professional-level services, including regular, full backups. Unfortunately, a hard drive crash is not the only way to lose your data.

That's all fine and dandy, but what if your ISP goes *poof!* and disappears on you? It happened to me once before, so you'd think I would have learned. Unfortunately, it seems I haven't.

For the second time, my websites went kablooey! along with my host. For a goodly portion of the day, yesterday, I thought for sure everything was gone. Of course, I had nothing backed up locally. You'd think I'd learn.

Well, luckily the problem simply that my ISP's upstream provider went dark on them, and when they called their secondary to switch things over, someone screwed something up somewhere and they went away, taking me (and a lot of others) with them.

After a few hours, though, all is well, once again. I've learned my lesson this time! I'm going to back things up for sure! Real Soon Now, that is...