Choosing A Backup Plan For Your Site

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By Tom Marchido I’m a huge advocate of backing up, backing up, and backing up! Regardless if you have a website, a server, or a computer, all of these contain irreplaceable files. For those important files, once-in-alifetime picture memories, music files, or anything that just can’t be lost, backups are absolutely critical. Choosing a backup plan for your site is, and should be, relatively painless, as you will see. The most important aspect is that you understand the reason why backups are so important, and that this task is perhaps easier than you thought!

Choosing a backup plan for your site involves investigating what your options are, compared to how large your backups might be. For example, if you own a large, multipage website, then a robust backup plan on the order of several gigabytes is in order. This plan should include scheduled, automatic backups as well as real-time backups. Automatic backups occur at a specified time interval that you set, and normally is a full backup each time it runs, with an incremental provision built in. That is, only changed files are backup after a full scan is performed. That is the most effective type of backup to use because you won’t need to be concerned if a file was mistakenly left out of the list of files to be backed up. Instead, all of your files are scanned, and only the ones that have changed are backed up.

Real-time backups, on the other hand, occur as changes are made to files. This happens almost immediately. The software that is constantly monitoring your system for any changes performs a backup in the background immediately after a change is found. This is peace of mind when it comes to backing up your site or any other files.

Typically, a quality backup plan will have redundancy built-in, in case the provider has an issue. This is so they can recover your files immediately. They also offer cloud storage (off-site) and local storage.

Both are necessary and useful. Cloud storage assures that your files are stored elsewhere in case of fire, flooding, or other disaster. Local storage provides for much faster file restoration, which makes the process run much quicker and smoothly should the need for a restore operation become necessary.

Depending on your particular situation, choosing a backup plan for your site from all of the available choices around today may seem like a daunting task. My advice is that you read any reviews about your choices, and then give one or two a try. Many have free trials available so you can test the service fully before deciding to buy. Rarely will you ever be held to a contract, so feel free to try as many as necessary. Before you do, however, make sure you have an initial backup ready to go, just in case!

Depending on the size and complexity of your site, your online business as well as your personal files should always be backed up. A few well-known companies come to mind. Barracuda Networks and Symantec handle large-scale operations, while Carbonite and iDrive are suitable for your personal backups, just to name a few.

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