Many of us have spent countless hours developing and refining our websites. Also, if you deliver electronic content (ebooks, art work, software) you have spent much time creating these goods as well. Don’t risk losing everything! Make sure you can always get back to where you were by having multiple backup versions.

First a couple of basic points: Most hosting providers perform backups on a regular basis (weekly, daily, or on demand); You should always have a local copy on your own home computer or burned to CD. Now with that said, there are still some open issues. What if your hosting provider only provides weekly back-ups and you make a change to your site, publish it with your editor (or FTP it), and then discovered some mistakes that were difficult to roll back from, and now the hosting provider has backed up your mistakes? If you don’t change your content much this may not be a problem. Most of us have Zip disks or read/write CD drives at this point, but not everyone. Also, what if your local copies are destroyed say in a home fire, or if your local computer disk drive crashes and you had no copy (come on -- admit it, I know you're out there)?

In the interest of protecting your online assets, it is important to save your website to an online storage site. Most businesses store their important data files offsite, and here is a way for you to do the same--for free. Many web-based storage sites allow plenty of space to store large files, so you can save daily or weekly snapshots of your site as needed. You can also register for more than one of these sites; and the good news is that there are still a few that are FREE! I will tell you how to find them shortly.

First, here is an example of how you could use these services. If your hosting provider creates weekly backups (say on Sundays), you can make a snapshot of the site prior to publishing any changes and save it to the online file storage site. This way you can always rollback if there is a problem. (Make sure you zip it before you store it!) Once the hosting provider executes its weekly backup, you can decide whether to delete the online storage version. Personally, I know that sometimes backups are not checked by hosting providers, and if they are not diligent about verifying saved data or replacing old tapes, you may find that the one day you need a file or two restored, that the data is corrupted.

There is a great site at http://useful.webwizards.net/wbfs.htm that lists all the web-based file storage sites currently available. Note that not all are free services. I’ve looked at a few of them (and use some of them as well), and thought it would be a good idea to mention a select few:

* Yahoo! Briefcase

If you have a Yahoo account, this is a great free service at http://briefcase.yahoo.com. You get 30MB for free. You can share these files with others by designating which Yahoo users can see your files. They even have Yahoo! Drive client that lets you access your files right from your desktop. You can get more space for a small fee of about $2 per month.

* X-Burn

This is a great service; they are at http://www.xburn.com/index.html. You can have any files off your hard drive burned to CD and shipped to you for a total cost of $5.95! They will even back up your website directly from the Internet and send it to you on CD. This is a great deal for those who don’t yet have a CD burner.

* BraveNet File Storage

Bravenet.com offers a lot of great FREE services, and if you have an eBusiness, you should sign up now! One of the things they offer is 100MB of file hosting (more than any other service), which can be used to store files as a backup, or as a web presence. Plus a ton of great webmaster stuff. You have to register, but it's free.