The importance of TESTING backups

Well, fuck me.

For anyone that may follow my fan page on Facebook, I had a very massive “technical” problem which involved every single of my websites going down and to make matters even worst … all of my backups ended up either not working, disappearing or outright bullshit.

Well, this is the problem I had lately as after the issue I had with the system, all of my backups were useless and although thankfully I was able to restore them using different methods (thank you recovermywebsite.com and Comcure!), I would have been screwed if they were not there.

So let us talk about backups and how to restore them. Well, the first thing you need is to make sure all of your backups are stored remotely and a good example of this would be Dropbox. I would recommend as much as possible to make sure your backups are in “raw” format as possible so basically zip them if you have to but you can just store them as directories so even if a part of the backup is damaged you still have a lot left.

So now you have a method to make a backup I would then recommend now and then to checking the data and restoring it on another system to make sure you can restore it (if you got just raw files etc, you may not need this bit).

Overall I would make sure to keep checking that the backups are happening and that you can use them.

Ah well just need to vent about this!

But seriously check your backups now as I spent quite a while restoring websites from archives online hoping for the best (although in the end, I was able to get my backups from Comcure!).

By the way, for anyone visiting this website due to the words “Comcure shut down 2015” – contact them NOW as they may have backups!

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net