When working on a website, I constantly take backups of all files and databases relating to that specific website. That way, I am confident that if anything goes wrong or if I write a piece of fatal code, then the project can easily be restored. What about a live website which changes on a daily basis?

Many websites are dynamic and rely on databases and other dynamic technologies to function. Most of these websites are changing all the time. Every time a new post is published, every time a registered user performs an action, every time a purchase is made. As you can imagine, some websites change more often than other – whether it be every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week or every month. It’s these changes that make it vitally important to perform regular full backups of your website files, databases and even server configuration (if possible, depending on your host).

Every day, dangerous virus’ work their way through the internet from website to website, and network to network. Hackers are conatantly on the look out for vulnerable websites. Spyware is constantly crawling the web. Scamming and phishing becomes more threatening on a day to day basis. And all of those are looking to attack your website and your server. If a hacker was to take your website down, then it’s important that you have a backup to restore from quickly (and of course change passwords, etc.).

There’s also the event of server failure. Just like your computer, a server can fail at any time. A hard drive within that server could faile. What happens then? All of your data and files are wiped. So what happens if you don’t have a backup? Well then you have lost your websites forever – and you will have some very angry clients (unless of course you rebuild them, but that would be time consuming and very difficult to get the sites exactly the same; and you wouldn’t be able to re-create all of your data).

It’s better to be safe than sorry. Backup as often as you can. The final key thing to remember is store your backups externally, not on your server.