If you are a website owner and value your website or blog, backing up your website content and data is important. 70% of small businesses fail after a data loss. All the more reason to backup your data. I use Amazon Web Services S3 for storage of my website data. S3 stands for Amazon Simple Storage Service.
Why You Should Backup Your Website
Think about this if you will. You have a website. Your website contains 40 pages of content. Lets say writing, proofing, editing, and posting takes 4 hours per article. That is 160 hours or one man month. That is just the amount of time you spent creating content. You probably spent a lot of time on the design and layout as well. Losing your website could be very costly and might even be the catalyst for you going out of business.
10 Reasons You Should Backup Your Data
- Human Error – I was working a website project when another developer completely deleted the web application from the production machine. It took years to develop that application so recreating it was not an option. We had a copy on another server, however that was a test and development environment. It would have taken months to update the development copy. Several years earlier I had configured a script that ran daily to backup all the data and files on the server. Because I had been backing up the production server, I was able to upload the latest copy of the web application and it’s associated data within a couple hours.
- Viruses & Malware – A friend of mine that owns a data center tells me his biggest concern is someone opening an email that contains a virus. Interesting insight. He says all other possible points of hacking are secure.
- Hard Drive Damage – Damage to hard drives can caused by a number of factors, such as a computer fan failure that allows the computer to overheat or power surges, to name just a few. Hard drives often crash leaving the data on the drive unattainable.
- Power Outages – This can be a real problem for hard drives and all the components within the computer. An unexpected power outage can create power surges that are deadly to computer components and may cause damage to the hard drive and / or corrupted data.
- Computer Theft – This happened. Think employee or a burglar.
- Liquid Damage – Soda, water, fire sprinklers, floods, etc.
- Disasters – Hot weather causing strain on the electrical grid that could cause a brown out that could kill computer equipment. Fires that burn electrical lines, etc.
- Software Corruption – Software that gets corrupted which can cause data to become corrupted. Power outages, brownouts, and improper shutdown are among the causes of software corruption.
- Hard Drive Formatting – Accidentally formation a drive that contained business data can be the source of data loss.
- Hackers – Security breaches by hackers is almost a daily news staple. While most of the data breaches we hear of are someone stealing data while leaving the hacked data intact. Hackers can be destructive.
Data loss can happen for may other reasons as well.
70% of Small Companies Fail After Major Data Loss
With a 70% failure rate of those small businesses that lost data, one would think making regular backups would be important. Data is important to the survival of the small business. I recommend you backup your website daily.
I Recommend AWS S3 Backups
I’ve been backing up to Amazon S3 for maybe a decade. I’ve used those backups several times. And the best part is the price. I personally spend less than a dollar a month to backup to Amazon S3. Cheap insurance.
Conclusion
It takes time and effort to build a website. It takes just a moment to cause it to disappear. I listed 10 causes of data loss and there are more. I shared that backing up to AWS S3 is what I prefer. And I shared that the price is right. You might spend much less than a dollar a month to backup a small website on a daily basis. If you are not backing up your website daily, I would recommend making that a priority.