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The Importance Of Website Backups
What is important?
It is common sense that backing up data is important. Everyone plans it, everyone know it is crucial and yet too many organizations fail to perform it regularly and/or cannot quickly restore their data due to lack of experience or sheer panic when it all hits the fan!
Why is the database so important?
When it comes to a website, there are hundreds if not thousands of files stored on the server, together with optionally one or more databases, each containing several hundred records. If a CMS (content management system) is used for a website, the database is the most vital key to its functionality - to put it in user terms, without a database the website will just show an error in the client's browser.
How can you backup?
There are of course many ways to backup/restore a website; for instance you can ftp to the server and copy all the files to/from your pc and you can then log into the database(s) and export/import all the data. However, there are two issues that are in some ways much more important; firstly you must do this regularly (to prevent loss of recent data) and secondly you must know when your website is in need of a restore in the firstplace.
What we do
In order to provide reliability with our service, The Media Farm combine two methods to tackle the situation and keep control should the worst happen. Firstly, we have an automated system that "watches" all of our client websites and tells us if they are not showing what they should (website are sometimes hacked). Secondly, we have an automated backup scheduling system that backs up websites regularly to the Amazon S3 "cloud"; S3 is a highly secure and robust storage solution.
Combining the above methods means that should the worst happen, you can rest assured we have a backup of your site and are already working to get it restored for you.