You've back up everything you possibly can on your computer. Now your business is totally safe, right? Have you thought about your website? Many people expect that their web host will have a backup or maybe they don't even think about it at all. Now's the time to back up your website and online data, while you still can. Make sure you do this, as soon as possible. Here are some possibilities of what can happen when you don't back up your website, and in many cases these actually happened.
1. You are cleaning up your discussion forum or message board and accidentally deleted or 'prune' something that you didn't mean to.
2. Your web hosting company goes out of business or sells their business to a company you prefer not to be hosted with.
3. Your site goes down for a few hours or even a day at a time because you host is upgrading and having lots of downtime. Don't think it could happen to you? This happened to me!
4. You work with several people 'live' on a website. They accidentally overwrote your work and you didn't save a copy of the page.
5. You need to put your site back to the way it was before you did anything because after trying to upgrade the software or scripts it's not working right.
6. Your web host holds your site or domain captive. Pending your dispute, you need to setup your site all over again even in another place and domain.
7. Your website gets hacked and everything was deleted. I've experienced this. While not everything was deleted, it was a large enough chunk. Also, in those early days, I had just learned to edit websites live and had no copy on my hard drive.
8. Some web hosts will keep backups but there is no way to be sure they will have what you need, when you need it. One time I was managing a site where we needed to restore a database. After going to the web host we found out that they only had one backup for several days before the problem occurred and two for after the problem occurred. This was disappointing because we had to go with the oldest one and lose a few days of content.
9. While moving web hosts, due to a misunderstanding, the old account was canceled and deleted too early.
10. Your web host reviewed your site and decides you have violated their terms of service and shuts down your account in short notice.
11. You uploaded the wrong site or folder and overwrote the previous one. It's not uncommon to do this type of thing when you have a very large list of sites you're publishing too, and to make matters worse you did this when you were just really tired.
12. You or someone reinstalled FrontPage extensions and now your redirects, error pages, fancy URL's and what not don't work anymore. You see, when you reinstall FrontPage extensions, it re-creates all your .htaccess files. That means, any customizations you had will also be lost.
13. You had custom programming done to your scripts. Your new web master upgraded the script and can't remember where or what all the modifications are. Worst, he/she doesn't know how to re-program those customizations.
14. A hacker inserted malicious code on all your website's pages and you need to rollback to the previous good version.
15. You or your webmaster forgot to save your blog's database when saving the files and now you no longer can access your old site.
It doesn't matter how well you know your web host or how great your relationship is, it's up to you to keep backups and make sure they are up to date. This is no one's responsibility but you. Have everything backed up to a place where you, as the site owner, can have access to them. Don't wait on doing any of this, get your web site back ups done now while there are NO problems to deal with.
