Friday Roundup: Backups are Boring?

Welcome to Friday Roundup. It is Friday January 27, 2017. Today's topic is, "Backups are boring?" Hello everyone, I'm John Peterson with Develare, and backups are boring. Who has the time to check them? Who has the time to do them? Doesn't my web host do that anyway? Let me tell you a little story that we had with a share hosting environment. Shared hosting is typically inexpensive hosting, five dollars a month, that kind of thing. We were moving our test servers, which are never seen on the front end by any visitors or anything like that. We were moving our test servers from one shared hosting environment, to another.

We moved to the new guys, we thought they were awesome, they were faster, pretty good rate. It was good for this backend testing that we do. All of a sudden they stopped working. I was like, "What's going on? Maybe I did something wrong when I was transferring them." I started looking into it, websites are not there, and open up some support tickets. Those guys like,"Okay, well we've had an issue with our server. No problem, we'll restore your website from a backup." I was like, "Cool, we just put it on there, no big deal."

A day or two later goes by and they're like, "Um, apparently our backups went bad. This hard drive got corrupted, and the controller got corrupted, and the backups got corrupted. Well, no more websites." I could only imagine what other people were going through. Thankfully we still had our originals on the old shared hosting environment. The new one's were toast. Just goes to show that backups are boring, until they're not. What do we recommend? We recommend always having another backup on a remote server. Nothing to do with your web host, so if anything goes wrong with what they do, you want a plan B so you can have your backups in a safe place. You don't want to be thinking about this, you don't want to be making reminders for yourself to go and back up your website, cause you'll get busy and you won't do it. It needs to be automated.

Now, there are a number of services out there, there are a number of plugins out there. The one that I like best is actually through JetPack. Comes from the folks at Automattic who make WordPress. We've used a number of other solutions, but JetPack has recently rolled in a service called, "Vault press." It used to be known separately as, "Vault press," but now it's all underneath JetPack. It's $3.50 per month, and it works great. You install it, and you're done. That's it. Very simple to use, you don't have to be technical. You install the plugin in WordPress, activate it, pay $3.50 a month, and that's it.

Very helpful, I hope you guys enjoy it, enjoy the tip there, and are able to make sure that you don't get caught flat footed. Backups are boring, until they're not. Be prepared. I'm John Peterson with Develare signing off, and hope you've had a great week.