Creating Manual Backups Of Your Account
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008Hello,
Most web hosts as does BizOHost provide some type of backup service. In our case we provide weekly backups. Whether or not your host provides a backup it is always a good idea to make a backup of your account and store it locally on your computer. If your site is static such as plain text site using no databases doing a simple backup each time you make major changes will be sufficient. However, if you have a site using technology such as MySQL databases where your stored information is frequently changing. Depending on how frequently your information is changing you may want to at least make a weekly manual backup of your own. Lets look into why it’s a good idea to make your own weekly backups.
In one example lets say your host makes backups each Sunday. On Tuesday you make major changes to your site. On Wednesday however when making additional changes you accidently delete some important files. Now your host of course may restore your account. However, as this would be from the backup on Sunday the important changes you made would not be included. As a precaution it would have been helpful to make a backup prior to initial changes on Tuesday and then another backup after you have found that your site is now stable and running smoothly.
In another example lets look at the stability of your host. BizOHost as any other reputable host that provides backups will make every attempt to ensure your backup is available when needed. However in an imperfect world there are issues that occur. We do backups on several levels so this shouldn’t ever be an issue with us. However, lets say your host only provides backups on one level. This being the same server your web site is stored on. Now lets say there is an error with that drive and the data is lost. At that point there wouldn’t be any backup of your data available and if you didn’t manually create one all information for your site would be lost. That’s a pretty extreme case, but the point we are trying to emphasize is when dealing with sensitive information you typically want to eliminate any doubt.
When using Cpanel which is the control panel we provide you will login at yourdomain/cpanel. Once logged in you will select the “Backups” link.
From there you may either download a Full Backup which would include your emails, site files, databases, etc.. in one file, or you may download a partial backup of specific information.
In most cases as with us only the host would be able to restore the Full Backup. You may however provide this file to us if needed and we will restore for no charge. For a partial backup you would be able to restore file(s) on your own.