Back up your web site or lose it!

18 March 2008 - 14:40

Once upon a time a group of people woke up one morning and found that their web sites were unavailable. When they went to their web host's home page, that wasn't available either. Email to the host's support address bounced. Attempts to contact the host by phone were unsuccessful. Enquiries on web hosting forums established little more than that many other people were in the same situation. If they had had their own backups, these unlucky people could have opened an account with a new web host and had their sites up and running again in a few hours. But most didn't have backups.

An acquaintance of mine went on holiday. When he returned he found that his home page - a personal site and labour of love - was showing a generic page from his web host. When he contacted the host, he found that his account had been closed because his web hosting subscription had expired. He had forgotten to renew it, and the payment reminders had gone to an email address he no longer used. The host deleted the account, and the contents of the account expired from its backups. My acquaintance had no backup either. Months of irreplaceable work had been irretrievably lost.

Tech-Pro.net websites run on web servers that use the cPanel management interface. It's a great control panel, but it provides no easy way to create and maintain regular, up to date backups on your local hard drive, for use in emergencies like those just described. You can log in to cPanel and download a backup manually, but it's a chore to have to do and easy to forget. Other methods involve some knowledge of scripting and/or the ability to run a local FTP server to receive the backups. To make the job easier, we had Site Backup CP created. The program has just been updated to version 1.3, adding support for web hosts like the one we currently use for www.tech-pro.net, which only allows https: access to cPanel.

Site Backup CP doesn't do anything you couldn't do manually from the cPanel interface, or that you couldn't automate if you are knowledgeable enough to write scripts. But if you can't be bothered or don't know how to do that, it allows you to download backups of your site home directory, MySQL databases and email filters and aliases, with a couple of clicks of the mouse. You can also automate these backups to run automatically using the Windows Task Scheduler.

Site Backup CP lets you create backup sets specifying what you want to back up using a simple graphical interface. These are exactly the same backups you would download using cPanel, because cPanel creates them. So they are 100% compatible with the cPanel restore function. (If they won't restore, complain to your web host.)

Whether your web site is your business shop window, your main source of income, or just a personal home page, don't risk losing it. Don't rely on your web host to keep backups, or for those backups to be available if you need them. If your web server has a cPanel control panel and you aren't currently backing it up, Site Backup CP just might save you from a tragic loss.