We back up your website, they said.
It’s fully automated, they said.
Your website is safe with us, they said.
And then one day, this happened:
“Due to an admin error, my webhost deleted 27 sites of mine from my VPS server last week. Deleting all sites without my permission and without taking any sort of snapshot/mirror/backup. The webhost did apologise but pointed out that their terms of service state that they are NOT responsible for any loss of data. Even if they deleted the data themselves. I naively put my trust in the ‘experts’.”
Craig Lockwood goes on to say that he feels physically sick.
I almost feel physically sick just thinking about it!
What a really tough lesson to learn. I think it’s awesome that he was willing to share his story. A huge reminder to the rest of us. I know that I have dialed-back my website backups because my web host takes care of it for me. This is certainly a wake-up call for me and should be for you, too.
Back up your website, again.
Don’t let this happen to you!
I recommend you read Craig’s full story on his website, as it’s been an amazing motivator to get my own back-ups in order and I’m sure it will do the same for you.
Eric J says
I guess i should enable that backup to dropbox option!
Eric Dye says
YES!
Kevin at SiteWizard LLC says
Ouch! That’s no fun. It’s appalling that a lot of web hosting companies don’t do a respectable job of backing up their customers’ data. While my own company has a limited liability policy on data, we also perform multiple daily backups on-site and off-site (cloud hosted) so we can bring back websites or email up to 30 days old if needed. We also monitor customer websites 24/7 to make sure they are online and performing well. If there is a problem, we want to know about it before our customers do.
Since you are running a full virtual server, I recommend using a third party off-site backup solution like JungleDisk, Carbonite or Mozy to back up your website and databases daily. Those services are for Windows, but I’m sure there are good alternatives if you’re running Linux. Even if you’re running on shared web hosting, you can probably find a solution to do backups via FTP.
I personally like JungleDisk because it is dirt-cheap and stores its data on cloud-hosted providers (Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud). Adding a third party backup service provides you good redundancy in case your host flakes out again. Best wishes for no more web host headaches!
Charles Specht says
Yikes, so how do you back up a website?
Eric J says
I use http://wordpress.org/plugins/backwpup/
Eric Dye says
There are several options that vary in degrees of price and feature set. Sounds like I should cover that! Thanks, Charles!
Darryl Schoeman says
Thanks for posting this and letting us learn from someone else’s mistake. ~ Darryl
Eric Dye says
🙂
Awazie Ikechi says
I can feel craig’s pain. My site was deleted from the server by a malwre. I was lucky that i had a backup but the pain of uploading my backup files on my server was stressful especially as the ISP in my country don’t provide great services.
Eric Dye says
YIKES!