A couple of days ago I was messing around with the theme I use on this blog. The theme I call cleverly call MarksBlogTheme, ok not so clever, it is the the first theme I have created for WordPress. I am very new to CSS and PHP. In the past I ran a fairly successful website but without the knowledge of CSS, PHP and all the other languages it was doomed to fail really and after a couple of years I abandoned the site and closed it down. The idea of creating that old site was not to pull in lots of people, was not to make a business, it was to A. Have fun and B. learn a little on website creation. That was the whole point from the start. This time around with my Blog my aim is rather the same just with some tweaks. This time I A. Want to have Fun, B. Want to learn about website creation, C. Help anyone I can with my experiences along the way.
Anyway to get back to topic, I do often waffle a bit in the opening, the other day whilst, tweaking, not messing with the theme of the blog, I some how ended up causing the whole Theme to just, well, break. It refused to show the Header and Footer correctly and whilst many people in the UK were fast asleep I was frantically trying to figure out what I had done. Why not just restore a from one of the many backups you should have, I hear you say? Well, stupidly I fully backup the WordPress database but for some reason only ever backed up the very Original theme version 1 I suppose you could say of the MarksBlogTheme and since I have made hundreds of changes. Hours past trying to work out what went wrong and it was looking like I would have to either start all over or go through each bit of code 1 line at a time. Luckily it didn’t get to this, I noticed an erroneous style sheet had somehow, my fault, been put in completely the wrong directory and for some reason the whole theme was pulling the style from this broken sheet. As soon as I deleted it the theme was fixed.
I was lucky but if I had deleted the working style sheet, the site would of been looking awful for days while I fixed or created a new one. This really got me thinking, why on earth hadn’t I backed up the Whole site. I had been backing up the SQL databases on a weekly schedule but not the whole site. Also when I was “Tweaking” the code for the theme I was changing the only Master copy of the theme I had got. I’m hoping this has actually taught me a lesson and now I am backing up the site more regularly and that’s the whole site not just a part of it. The only thing is I would like some sort of software that could do this automatically perhaps, pulling from my FTP and putting a copy on my PC, if you have any ideas please contact me!
Here though are some tips on backing up your website:
- Backup all the website or at least the parts that if your site just disappeared you could restore it quickly and as it was before!
- Make Multiple backups of the files you are editing for instance, when you have a working theme or a working part back it up then tweak further. That way you always have a working system to fall back on(something I didn’t until now)!
- Do Multiple Backups in Multiple Areas! There’s no point in just putting all your backups on one hard drive or one PC. If you hard drive fails or your whole PC catches fire you have lost your backups. Ideally you want to have Hard Copies i.e. on CD, DVD, USB Drives also you could do with having these in multiple locations not just your home. Perhaps leave a USB stick at work, upload your files to a secure host other than your webhost, megaupload for instance. Just remember if you hold peoples personal details these must be encrypted.
- Backup and Backup Regularly. There’s no point like I did in have Version 1 of your site backed up when your using version 5 regular backups are always best. Depending on your site this could be Weekly, Daily, even hourly. Just think how often content is changed and or added to and you will be able to work it out.
- Don’t just keep the latest backup. Depending on the size of your site you may be tempted to save space to just save the most recent backup. The problem with this is, this version may not have been backed up correctly and could be corrupt, or you may have an error deep within the version which could cause problems in the future! You would hate to only have the most recent backup go to restore the site and “File Corrupted” appear! Hard Drives are “as cheap as chips” these days and that’s the potato chips not the silicon variety. So buy a few USB Sticks, Several CDS, Hard Drives anything to store some safe backups on.
So here I have given some tips. It shows that I know what to do it’s just easier not to bother I suppose. Well yes it is, until that day comes when you just need the backup you couldn’t be bothered to do! Don’t be stupid like I was Backup, Backup Regularly, Backup Everything, Everywhere!
If you have some tips, automated software or anything that would/could be helpful e-mail me, Tweet me @marksblog or just post a comment!
- Last Updated on 20th March, 2012 at 10:53 pm
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