Total Wiped Out! Disappeared! Vanished!...these were the words from one of my friends when one of his online databases had been hacked into and caused a total havoc to his online business. All his mailing lists, data files and valuable information pertaining to his e-commerce were lost beyond recovery, simply because he overlooked the importance of regular backup.

These days, database-driven websites are just as important as the business itself. All the customer data, transaction information as well as your mailing lists are stored in database format. Popular ones are the open-source database called MySQL.

But the main problem here for all the home business owners especially is that they would tend to rely on their web hosting to provide them the so-called reliable hosting. The fact is, most of the web hosting in general on the internet are just as fragile as you could expect. Ever heard of just many of the poor websites been hacked and corrupted by the unscrupulous hackers, for example?

While we can’t really totally prevent these hacking from happening, it is therefore crucial for you to be able to take your own preventive measures to periodically backup your website databases. Here are some of the reasons why a database backup is important to your business.

There are times when you would want to switch to another hosting for your websites, but the hassle of contacting your hosting for the help on backups and restoration of your databases can, at times be a major set back for you. That is why, once you’ve figured out and got used to backing your database, duplicating your database into another one can just as easy as you want it to be. The point here is to consistently backup your database so that you will be able to restore the data back without causing a huge delay or site downtime. Remember, the longer the delay, the more money you’ll lose.

With the advent of immense technologies and tools available to the potential hackers, hacking into your websites and causing havoc to your business should prove to be a peanut for them. There are bunch of automated online tools or systems available which could backup your online database periodically, thus freeing yourself from the worries of the having your database wiped out someday.

Surprisingly, most of the website owners that I know of perform their website testing and fine tuning using their web hosting as their test bed. Since this method can take away some bandwidth and increase your server workload, with your backup file on hand, you could perform the same task on your own local computer just by restoring the backup file. If you are using a phpMyAdmin as your database administration console, backing up and restoring the MySql data is easy even for the beginners. At the end of the day you could potentially reduce a huge amount of workload from the server.

All computer systems are not 100% bug free. There are annoying times when your online system just couldn’t perform the way it should be and you could be driving nuts trying to find out what are the causes of it. It could simple be your corrupted data in your database. If you have backup data in place, you can just restore backup the relevant tables which you suspect have been corrupted or you can even restore the whole database if situation warrants. This should essentially save you a lot of your time trying to debug your online systems.

As a conclusion, knowing how to backup and restore should be learnt by all the online business owners. Backup and restore process can be very simple task for you to perform and once you’ve got the knack of it, you can be rest assured of your online database integrity and never to worry about losing lots of money from your website downtime.