World Backup DayWomen Do It Better Than Men
It’s March 31st and we all know what that means … it’s World Backup Day!
Well, okay, not everyone knows. But that’s because World Backup Day is about backups and backups are just boring.
Boring. Like selfies, standing in line, listening to politicians and people who Instagram their food.
Boring they all may be, but they aren’t important.
Backups, on the other hand, are important. Really important, as I’ve mentioned here.
And that’s why there is a World Backup Day – to let you all know how important they are.
Read on and learn something new today.
World Backup Day
The very simple description on https://www.worldbackupday.com says:
A backup is a second copy of all your important files — for example, your family photos, home videos, documents and emails.
Instead of storing it all in one place (like your computer), you keep another copy of everything somewhere safe.
So, saving your holiday pictures to a USB flash drive; that’s a backup.
Keeping a copy of your entire collection of movies on an external hard drive; that’s a backup, too.
Using a cloud storage company to save the entire contents of your hard drive; that’s a backup – a good one.
Watch their excellent video that explains backups and World Backup Day in 90 seconds:
For more details check out their site at www.worldbackupday.com or the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/WorldBackupDay/ (as I write this the World Backup Day website is down – I do hope they have a backup!)
And in case you’re wondering about that statistic in the headline …
Women back up better than men
According to a survey by Airbackup (now ITBrain), men are almost twice as likely to lose important work data as women. Make of that what you will.
Men are almost twice as likely to lose important work data as women! World Backup Day is March 31st.
Why do it?
Of course, you know by now that backups are important but it never ceases to amaze me how few are doing them. The two main reasons to take regular backups are
- in case of data loss and
- to recover a file from an earlier date.
The first is clearly more important for anyone with a business. Data loss happens because of
- equipment malfunction or “machines breaking down” in plain English. (42%)
- human error or “people messing up” in plain English. (32%)
For tons more fascinating World Backup Day statistics check out this infographic from Cloudwards. (A bit dated now, but still interesting.)
Courtesy of: Cloudwards.net
Websites need backup love, too
It’s fairly clear how useful a backup of all your favourite photos and music can be.
More often neglected are the backups of your website. A frightening 72% of small business owners do not back up their website.
I know from speaking to them that most business owners believe their web hosting provider takes care of their backups. (I even know an owner of a web design agency who believes this. Ouch!)
Your hosting provider does take backups but they aren’t at all responsible for making them useful to you. Check out some of the small print from these popular hosts:
EXTRACTS FROM SOME HOSTING PROVIDERS’ TERMS OF SERVICE CONCERNING BACKUPS
GoDaddy: “You shall be solely responsible for undertaking measures to: (1) prevent any loss or damage to your website or server content; (2) maintain independent archival and backup copies of your website or server content…”
Hostgator: “HostGator backups are provided as a courtesy and are not guaranteed. Customers are responsible for their own backups and web content and should make their own backups for extra protection.”
Rackspace: “… you agree that you will maintain at least one additional current copy of your Customer Data somewhere other than on the Rackspace Public Cloud Services. If you utilize Rackspace cloud backup services, you are responsible for performing and testing restores … “
Siteground: “We will use good faith efforts to backup data stored on the shared Services once a day (Shared Backups). Shared Backups are intended for internal use only and we cannot guarantee that a Shared Backup will be available for restore upon your request. It is your responsibility to backup data of all your content in order to prevent potential data loss. “While we may provide assistance, it is your obligation to restore your website.”
And my nomination for a clearly stated denial of all responsibility goes to Bluehost …
Bluehost: “BlueHost.com assumes no responsibility for failed backups, lost data, or data integrity. Bluehost from time to time backs up data on its servers, but is under no obligation or duty to Subscriber to do so under these Terms. IT IS SOLELY SUBSCRIBER’S DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY TO BACKUP SUBSCRIBER’S FILES AND DATA ON BLUEHOST SERVERS, AND under no circumstance will Bluehost be liable to anyone FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND under any legal theory for loss of Subscriber FILES AND/or data on any Bluehost server.”
It should be very clear to you that you and you alone are responsible for taking backups of your website. You’re also responsible for making sure those backups work.
Here’s how to do it for your WordPress site …
How to set up WordPress Backups
I am biased but I’m honest when I say that you’re much better off hiring the services of professionals. It’s worthwhile seeking the advice of professionals.
But I get it. You’re a business owner and you prefer to at least try things out for yourself.
So, read the Step 1 of this post to learn how to set it up for yourself.
Conclusion
By now you’re itching to get out there and start doing all those backups you’ve been postponing.
It’s not all over every media channel today but there is no good reason to ignore World Backup Day. Take an important backup right now, even if that means making a simple copy of a directory somewhere.
And if you take your WordPress website backups seriously, you’ll get professional help!
Contact us here at WPStrands for answers to all your questions.
I hope you learned that every day should be Backup day for your WordPress website. If you did, I’d appreciate you leaving a comment and sharing it with anyone else you think would benefit from it.
Hashtags #worldbackupday #march31st
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