When I was a freshmen in college, I learned a new acronym in my political science class: CYA.
Ever heard it?
It stands for “Cover Your Ass(etts)”, and it was one of the best things I heard in class that year. Other than the fact that my professor married a marine because he was hot. Anyway.
What do you do to cover your assets? Your blog, your servers?
Having a backup plan is always helpful. Since moving to EC2, I’ve had to develop a backup plan in case my server ever explodes and I have to start over again.
Here’s some ideas for backing up your blog:
- Use a third party backup system (backup to the cloud, to an external hard drive, etc)
- Backup often – I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain something so obvious
- Verify your backups! Don’t just trust that they’re good. Test them. What’s your plan if your backup is bad?
Personally, I have several methods just in case:
My database is optimized every 3 hours to eliminate overhead and increase speed. It’s also backed up daily and weekly. The backups are stored on my server and sent to Dropbox, except for the weekly backups that go to a dedicated S3 bucket.
The WordPress core of my system isn’t as important, because it’s easy to replace if anything goes awry. However, it is backed up weekly and monthly to a dedicated Amazon S3 bucket. The monthly backups are maintained for a year then deleted automatically – unless I state otherwise.
The database, to me, is more important than the WordPress core of my blog. The database holds my content, which is what I’ve worked the hardest on. On top of that, all of my theme files are hosted on Amazon anyway, and it’s not like that’s going anywhere.
All of my solutions are powered by WordPress plugins. I see no need to invest in services like Vaultpress when I can do it myself. I love what Vaultpress does, but I can do it alone much cheaper!
The only downside of doing it yourself is the fact that if you’re backups don’t happen or are corrupt, it’s no ones fault but your own.
What do you do for backup? How do you CYA?
