A lot of hosting companies (including DomainingServers.com) offer off-server backups and that’s great but should you rely on these backups? No, no, no! I don’t care which company you’re with and I don’t care how great their track record is, you should always (and I mean ALWAYS) back up data yourself.
It’s not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of common sense. Your hosting company’s backups should represent another layer of data protection but not the only additional layer. When it comes to your business, a small dose of paranoia can help and if you keep this simple tip in mind, I guarantee you’ll thank me at one point or another 🙂
November 13th, 2011 at 4:13 am
dropbox is good for this
or you can keep files on the computer hdd somethimes it is what I do
November 13th, 2011 at 9:34 am
@Xdreamer: sure, the “old school” approach can still be effective, oh and remember that you don’t necessarily have to ALWAYS back up all of your files, in some cases it makes sense to only back up your database, for example.
November 13th, 2011 at 9:47 am
Good tip. The argument that your host has a good track record on making backups is not a valid one.
Remember Distribute.IT disaster earlier this year ?
Distribute.IT could not recover the data from the backup server.
End of the story is that users lost their data/website and Distribute.IT never recovered from the attack and went out of business.
November 13th, 2011 at 10:44 am
@theo: …and let’s not forget that even HUGE datacenters can be affected, not sure if you guys remember the fire which affected ThePlanet a few years ago. In case you don’t know how huge ThePlanet is, I’ll go ahead and just say that HostGator keep their servers there (yes, HostGator was affected as well and some of their servers including one of the dedicated servers I had with them at that point were hit pretty bad) and ThePlanet recently bought SoftLayer 🙂
So as you can see after analyzing the examples Theo and I referred to, even huge companies like HostGator and ThePlanet can be affected, no matter how many redundancy strategies they implemented. Again, the importance of the tip I just gave you shouldn’t be underestimated. Always back up data yourself as an extra layer of security, A-L-W-A-Y-S.
November 18th, 2011 at 11:05 am
As long as your saving it to another server or computer you’ll be good but backing up your site on the same server your running is not doing much.