If There Is One Thing You Should Do Today, It Is BACKUP!

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Yes, you heard me right. This is a serious matter. If you have not back up your work or data for some time, or god forbid, not at all, please do it NOW!

I’m a firm believer in the importance of backing up. Why? Cos’ past experiences tell me so!

I actually have friends who tell me that they don’t bother backing up. Their rationale, or should I say, excuse, is that they won’t be so unlucky to meet with a database or computer failure. One even told me that he don’t believe in backing up! Yikes!

Let me tell you flat out, in all honesty, if you are one of those that have never ever back up your stuffs before, you are an ACCIDENT waiting to happen. When the fateful day comes, you will be crying, swearing and cursing that you are so unlucky. Sorry, but you cannot blame anyone but yourself. So don’t take any chances. Buy a portable hard disk to back up your work or stand the risk of losing everything!

Let me recount some of my experiences with you to highlight the importance of backing up.

In the first instance, while working on the content of my friend’s finance site, there were some problems that occurred which wiped out 2 weeks worth of data. You may think 2 weeks mean nothing, but I update the site daily with new information, therefore it meant a hell lot to me.

Unfortunately there was no backup, and I had to labor through the whole day to restore everything. I wasn’t involved in technical and backend matters then, so I just had to grind my teeth and trudge on. Nothing I could do about it in this matter, other than being more convinced that ever of the fact that one will be royally screwed if he doesn’t back up regularly.

In the second instance, my laptop suddenly gave me the dreaded ‘blue screen of death’! The next thing I knew, my hard disk was gone! Kaput! No warning at all. At that time, I had everything in the laptop that was valuable to me. My lab reports, my investment documents, my pictures, my music files, my hard WORK!

Luckily, I bought a portable hard disk not long before that, and have been implementing a regular back up practice, hence I wasn’t adversely affected, other than the inconvenience of bringing my laptop to the computer center for reinstallation.

In the last case, this very site you are seeing now just decided to go crazy on me. Yes, I don’t know why but my WordPress database got deleted, and I couldn’t access my site at all! A check with my cPanel revealed that the database was gone, and I had no clue how it happened!

Again, very very luckily for me, I had the very useful and handy WP Backup plugin with Cron installed, which enabled scheduled regular backup, which will then be automatically sent to my mail. Easy peasy. No fuss. No hassle. No fiddling with MySQL and phpAdmin. All on automation mode. At that time, I scheduled the backup to be done every week, and it so happened that the database failure occurred one day after the scheduled back up, therefore I only lost 1 day of work. Really have to thank my lucky stars.

Since then, I up the backup frequency to be done on a daily basis. Overkill? Not at all. Given that I do update this site frequently, I’m not going to take any chances.

I’ve talked pretty much, but lets recap again shall we?

• Backup regularly - it’s a form of insurance. Shit happens, so don’t be an accident waiting to happen.
• Invest in a portable hard disk with disk space of at least 80GB, so that you can have many copies of backup.
• If you are using WordPress, do make use of the WP Backup plugin with Cron enabled to automate your backing up process.
• Alternatively, you can logged into your cPanel and set a Cron job to backup the database with phpAdmin.
• Get a FTP client like SmartFTP to download and backup your important files.

Backing up pays! Speaking about that, I have not backup yet! HELPPPPPPP…

I totallly agree with you! Better be safe than sorry! Ok, i’ll go back-up my database now! Thanx to the WP plugin! (and to you for reminding me to back-up) :)

Hi Jonathan,

Glad to see you are taken measures to back up. The risk of data failure is too painful to imagine and fathom. Be safe not sorry. =)

Cheers,
YongSing Jag

Very good advice. I know I have regretted not backing up in the past. This will now be part of my routine. Thanks for the reminder.

Hi DigitialNomad,

No prob dude!

Indeed backup is a vitally crucial habit which we should make a habit of doing.

Luckily for us, there are backup plugins to automate the job for us and make our life so much easier.

Cheers,
YongSing Jag

haha thats a funny pic of that cpu. but for soem reason i dont think its demise was accidental. But yea… id rather be safe than sorry and have my computer info backed up.
-Harry