I know, I know — what a mundane subject! But if this little post prods you into action, you may thank me later.

We’ve all heard horror stories about people who have “lost everything” in a computer crash and for whatever reason did NOT have a good backup of their most important files.

And backing up the data on your web server is equally important (sometimes MORE important) than the files on your office machine.

So, how safe is YOUR web server data? Do you have a backup process in place?

You may be surprised to hear that many hosting companies don’t backup the data on their DEDICATED servers — they leave that to their clients. If you’re on a shared hosting account, or if you have a dedicated server and know the data is being backed up regularly, you may be feeling pretty good right now.

But unless that data is backed up”offsite” (to another system in a different geographic location), don’t get too smug . . . you could still lose everything.

To start with, make sure everything you have on your server is also on your local machine. One of the resources in my “Little Black Book” was the CP SiteSaver software. If your web server uses the Cpanel administrative control panel, you can use CP SiteSaver to backup all your account files — including MySQL databases — to your local hard drive.

I bought it myself the other day (I realized I hadn’t put a backup plan into action for my new dedicated server yet — yikes!) and I have to say it’s pretty nifty. It was $27 and that’s way underpriced in my opinion — you just can’t put a price on the peace of mind it brings.

Call me paranoid, but I also like to have a 2nd backup in a different geographic location — so I decided to also use an online backup service (which allows me to backup data from my local machine to one located elsewhere).

Again I turned to my “Little Black Book” and reviewed the online backup services there . . . I really liked the “Altexa” service, and I stumbled upon a way to get it at half price!

I was actually looking at the Amazon “Simple Storage Service” (S3) web service as part of a programming spec. I clicked on the link to the Altexa “customer spotlight” and at the bottom of the resulting page, there was a link to Altexa. Apparently Altexa is looking at the referring URL because at the top of the page it says:

Special Offer for visitors from Amazon! 10GB space, for $60 per year instead of $120! 50% off!
This special offer is available on the “subscribe” page, only for visitors coming from Amazon.com

Now, a typical user will get 50% compression on the files they backup, so we’re talking 20GB of storage for 5 bucks a month — I don’t think you can beat that anywhere.

Well, I take that back — right now you can get a 120GB web hosting account at 1&1 for $3.74/month. But with Altexa you also get the backup software that automates the compression and online backup of all your selected files. Everyone has their own preferences, but for someone like me with no time (more like none of the required discipline) to manually do backups, Altexa seems like a good solution.

Take it from me, having your data backed up in multiple locations will help you sleep better at night — so click on the links above and get going before something bad (nay, “unthinkable”!) happens!

Paul