Backups: They Really Can Save Your Site

It’s one of the computing mantras that you hear over and over again–keep regular backups. But how many people do that despite hearing the occasional horror story of losing everything with a hard drive crash or a virus. I’ve always been someone who has good intentions of keeping things backed up, but if I’m left to myself to do them regularly, they often get overshadowed by the more exciting aspects of running my design business. Two weeks ago, I had a personal experience with why having multiple backups can be essential to ensuring your site stays up and functional.

Here’s what happened. It started after I purchased a new plugin for WordPress that allows your site to automatically translate your pages and posts and display them to a user based on their browser’s language settings. Since I get approximately 40% of my visits from countries that are not primarily English speaking, I thought this would be a fantastic way to server my customers. I knew this plugin would make some significant changes to my WordPress database, so I backed up my site with the WP Database Backup plugin, and I used the export function built into WordPress to export my site’s content in case things went wrong. On a Friday night, I set my site to translating, and hit the bed.

When I woke up the next morning, I discovered that all my site’s traffic had been redirected to a non-existant French version of my site. I tried adjusting settings in the plugin, but to no avail. Deactivating the plugin didn’t fix the problem either.
Since I knew I was missing out on sales, I knew I had to act quickly, so I opened up the MySQL admin on my server and tried to restore the backup I had made before using the plugin. It wouldn’t take. I tried two more times, but to no avail. This would have been the simplest way to get things back up and running. All of my site’s settings were contained in that file–widgets, plugins form set up not to mention all my posts, pages and comments. If the backup had restored as planned, then all of this would be instantly corrected and it would be “like it never even happened” to quote ServPRO.

But I wasn’t out yet. I still had the export XML file that I had made. This is a bit different from the database backup in that it only has my site’s content–no settings are included. I created a new database on my server and ran WordPress’ famous 5 minute installer and then imported the XML file. All in all, it took about 20 minutes to get everything back as it had been before the incident took place. It may not have been ideal, but I was able to get my site back up and allow customers to resume purchases in less than a half hour. So what did I learn?

1. Regular backups are a must. I have the WP Database Backup set to email me a copy of my database every day. I’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember. Now I periodically check the backups to make sure that I can use them. If I can’t import them, then they are pointless for me.
2. Multiple backups are necessary. I now export my site’s content via the tools>export command after I publish each post. I actually did lose one post through this whole process. I still have the text in my feed reader, so I will publish it again soon. This was just a lesson learned–if it isn’t backed up, it may not exist anymore after a failure.
3. Test plugins before you use them. When I first discovered WordPress, I made the mistake that lots of people do, in that I used too many plugins. They can be great, but if you mix too many plugins together you can expect trouble to creep in somewhere. There are exceptions to this, but my experience in helping hundreds of people with WordPress related issues tells me that this is the norm. I used to be good at testing a new plugin on another site to ensure that everything worked properly before I moved it to my main installation. This time I didn’t do that and a plugin cost me my site being down for about 5 hours. Lesson relearned. Unless you mind potentially having to rebuild your site, test a plugin someplace else before running it on your own site.
4. Don’t forget to backup your local computer too. I’ve been using Time Machine on my MackBook Pro since Leopard came out, but now I use Sugar Sync to maintain an automatic off site back up as well.

I think we all sometime or another will have a loss of data. If you are good about maintaining a backup routine that includes verifying your backups, you’ll be in good shape when disaster strikes.