Always have a backup plan.
Why are backups important?
You never know when something will go wrong with your website. No matter your security, all websites are vulnerable to hacking attempts, DDOS attacks, data theft and data loss.
Sometimes you just make a mistake
Trust me when I say that I have worked on many programming projects through my education and there have been many times when I change or add some code, overwriting my previous work, only to find that the undo function fails miserably. The undo function seems to be the most trusted “backup plan” for most of us. Both good and bad news here, there is no undo function when it comes to your website. It’s good because it pushes us away from the undo habit. It’s bad because we don’t have any other habit, therefore we do nothing.
Human error is bound to happen. Updating, installing, or deactivating a new WordPress plugin, theme, or some other function doesn’t always go as smoothly as we want. You could run a SQL query with some misspelled command which can cause huge amounts of data to become corrupted or otherwise wrongly updated.
The backup song
I found this funny rendition of the Beatles “Yesterday” song with the lyrics about backups. Credit goes to the author (unknown).
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.
I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data’s gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.
Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.
Here’s 3 easy steps to backup your website for free.
Step 1: Inside cPanel, select “Backup”
Step 2: Ensure the selection is the Home Directory. The email is not required, it will just send an email to that address when the backup is done.
Step 3: Select “Generate Backup”. Your website backup will be available to download when the page refreshes. The backup file is also in Home Directory, so you can get it through the file manager:
Learn how to believe in tomorrow:
Final Notes
Backups are the insurance of your internet existence… The only difference is that the claim is made to yourself, and coverage is free.. You just have to be responsible. The other option is to pay for a service to automatically make backups for you – send in a support ticket for more details on this.
When you host through Kiiff, we take a backup of your account every night – free of charge – provided your website is less than 1 GB in size, and we retain that backup until it is overwritten by the following day.