Why backup your website?
How can you do this?
How often should you create a new backup copy?

These are questions we get from many of our clients and this article will hopefully answer those questions.

Why backup your website?

Because you never know when something might happen to cause a failure of the site’s files and database and there is nothing more frustrating than to have to start all over with creating your website.

We cannot stress enough the importance of having reliable and recent backup copies of your work.

I personally have experienced a total loss of data and because I learned early in my computer training to make frequent backup copies of my work I have been able to recover from these data losses in most cases without having to start over from the beginning of whatever the project was.

How can you do this?

For a Joomla or WordPress platform website, the best and easiest method we have found is to use the Akeeba Backup system.

There are four versions, one for WordPress, one for Joomla, one for a ‘Stand Alone’ or ‘Solo’, and the ‘Professional’ versions. Each version is similar in the way they work with the Professional version having more features included.

For our Parnassus Creative Website Services clients we normally will install the version appropriate for your WordPress or Joomla website as a standing practice with no extra charge to you.

As a website owner, you have the option to upgrade to the Professional version by purchasing it from the developer of Akeeba Backup. The current subscription cost is about $45 annually for the Professional version. It is normally the responsibility of website’s owner to maintain this subscription independently from their contracted services with Parnassus Creative.

For our Parnassus Creative Website Services clients we have provided links to the Tutorial Videos created by the Akeeba Backup system’s developer for using Akeeba Backup on your website on our Client Help site at http://www.help.parnassuscreative.com/index.php/training-documents/akeeba-backup You must be logged in to view this webpage.

How often should you create a new backup copy?

The ideal answer is anytime you make a change on your website. That can be rather difficult and impractical for sites that have a lot of activity and once a week is more reasonable in most of these cases.

As a standing practice for all ‘Live’ or ‘Production’ websites we setup an automatic weekly backup command on our hosting service for each of our clients. These automatic backups do not require any interaction by the site’s owners to begin once the scheduled command is in the system. We control the schedule of when each automatic backup is started to eliminate any resources conflict on the hosting server. Normally all automatic backups are done on Fridays beginning at around 12am and continuing throughout the morning until all have completed.

As the site’s owner you may request a more frequent automatic schedule and you can manually initiate a site backup at any time from your site’s administration section. The latter is suggested whenever you make a lot of changes to your site to be done before you make those changes and again after. The first one before you make your changes is for if something goes wrong and you need to recover from it. The latter is so that your changes are included in the most recent site backup.

Source: Michael’s WordPress Blog

Source: Michael’s WP Blog