Now You See It Now You Don’t – Backing Up Your Blog

You’ve set up your blog.  Everything is going fine, you’ve got some traffic, people are recommending your blog to friends.  That picture of a cat juggling potatoes worked really well.  Readers seem to respond to it.  They must love cats.  You’ve been uploading content for a month now and you have a respectable amount of content on your site.  You sit back and relax, because life is just so good.  After making yourself a delicious sandwich you log on to your computer and check your blog.

BOOOOMMM.  Your blog is gone.  You refresh the page and still nothing.  You start to panic.  You suddenly realize that a month’s work has transformed into an error page.  All that time you spent looking for funny pictures of cats has been wasted.  Your blog, like magic, has gone.

I hope this tale illustrates the point I’m trying to say.  Many people don’t bother taking precautions as they never think the bad things will happen to them.  They don’t wear sunblock.  They prefer not to wear seatbelts.  They eat sushi a lot.  These people are setting themselves up for a world of trouble.  Disaster will happen to you one day in one form or another so it is very important to be prepared for it.

So what is the safety net of the blog world?  What will soften your fall when you stumble from grace?  It’s actually very easy.  The first part is so easy that I shouldn’t even bother telling you.  Maybe I won’t tell you, as telling you this might insult your intelligence.  You probably already know this.  I mean, you should, but I guess it would be cruel to build this up without telling you what it is.  Okay, here we go: INVEST IN A DECENT WEB HOST.  That was simple, right?  Look, web hosting is ridiculously cheap today, so there are no excuses for cutting corners.  Go with the big guys who have the experience and reputation to run your website RELIABLY.  No gimmicks, just 24/7 quality service.  I personally recommend Bluehost.com.  The reason it’s good to have one of the big guys instead of your friend who is a part-time weed dealer is because the big guys have the best customer support.  They have probably dealt with whatever question you have a thousand times before.  You will be in good hands.

The next thing to do is have a backup of every bit of content you post.  That means saving all of your adorable pictures of cats on to your computer.  If you’re really good, you should have a backup external hard drive with everything important on it.  Having an external hard drive will protect your precious material from any virus attacks or other annoying computer problems.  It doesn’t take long to save a copy of each file on to your computer.  So take the time and do this.  Most good web hosts have a backup system that will save your files in case of a malfunction, but if there’s anything that you learnt from ‘I, Robot’ it should be not to trust machines.

When blogging becomes a source of income for you, you have to protect your assets.  Back up everything- hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.  If you don’t, your life’s work can be gone in an instant.  Poof.  Now go back your stuff up.