Back Your Shit Up!

Oh yeah – here’s a cuss word  you haven’t seen before….the simple truth of why this article warrants such language is because your fearless leader of Wootness!™, the woman who sticks you in a corner with a dunce hat on and isn’t afraid to rub your nose in your mistakes is a total freaking idiot!

Yes, this article will be all about how *I*, in all my bright shining brilliance, lost this entire website in one push of the “enter” button.

I guess the details aren’t that important, but it boils down to the fact that I spent almost a month writing more than I have ever written in a similar time period in my life. I had a HUGE collection of articles and had tweaked the website settings until they were perfect. All day, this past Sunday, I was in sick with a head cold/flu and could not do anything but lay in bed with the laptop – so I put the time to good use and decided to upgrade to a new website template. I had already planned on doing it and had made the announcement here – and being in bed for an entire day allowed me about 14 straight hours to work on the new site and tweak the heck out of it.

About 9:30 pm, after having worked since 5 AM on the project, I installed a new plug-in. And the site disappeared. Totally. All that was left was the “Hello World” default post that comes with all brand new WordPress installations. Somehow the plug-in wound up re-installing a brand new blog OVER Wootness!™.

O.M.G!

I felt violently ill. I already felt ill, but this was much much worse.

I raced to my little private Facebook page I share with some photog buddies and cried out for help. And do you know that the response was? Well, it was nothing less than I deserved. After finding out that I had failed to back the site up at all, I was heckled.

Fortunately, my web hosting company has 24/7 support chat and I had them restore the site from their last backup which was just prior to the melt down.

All was good – but man did that give me a scare.

I administer 5 websites and this was the only one without a backup. I have NEVER had a site crash before this. In all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve NEVER had to restore a site using a backup. For some reason, I kept putting the Wootness!™ backup on the back burner.

So – for every site and blog you have, implement a backup schedule. I prefer to do mine daily, since I usually post on a daily basis.

And – maintain an OFFSITE backup. As in – do not backup your website to your laptop or desktop. Or if you do, at least have a backup to your backup in some offline storage area.

Which brings me to this nifty little trick:

If you are using a WordPress based site, there is a plugin called Backup to Dropbox. You can schedule your site to be backed up to your account at Dropbox, which is a free account that will give you 2 gigs of storage space. That’s plenty of room for a site backup.

Here’s a referral link – if you open up a free Dropbox account using my link, we will both get an extra 250 meg of space.

So yeah, do as I say and not as I do.

Geesh!