The title of this article may sound obvious, but it is extremely common for people to skip this key rule when it comes to working with technology. When data is important to you, your company or your own customers, then having your own locally or own offsite stored copy of a backup is critical.
No matter who the company is, technology fails sometimes, it can be a fault of multiple redundancy systems going out at once, issues with software that was dependant on to generate or even transfer them to storage devices. Having your copy gives you a second, third, fourth option dependant on your provider to get your data back online.
How easy is it to create a backup file?
Simple answer, very easy, below we show you how to preform a backup using 2 of the most common web hosting control panels, cPanel & DirectAdmin to generate your own backup and download it.
cPanel
First, login to your cPanel hosting control panel, commonly, you can find a quick login from your billing or client portal.
Once in to cPanel, look for the icon listed as ‘Backup’, also shown highlighted in the screenshot below:
This leads you to a simple option to download a full backup with details of what they can be used for, again as shown in the screenshot below:
Once you have clicked this button, it will begin generating a compressed file for you to download and store where you wish.
DirectAdmin
First, login to your DirectAdmin hosting control panel, commonly, you can find a quick login from your billing or client portal.
Once in to DirectAdmin, look for the icon listed as ‘Create/Restore Backups’, also shown highlighted in the screenshot below:
This leads you to a page with many options on what you would like to include in your backup, we recommend keeping everything selected as shown below and click the “Create Backup” in the bottom right corner, as shown in the screenshot below:
Once you have clicked this button, it will begin generating a compressed file for you to download and store where you wish.
What data is key?
The easiest way to answer that would be for us to say everything, which can be true, but it really comes down to your business. Commonly one of the most critical points is your databases, these hold so much information, especially for those bloggers or sites powered by content management systems. However, as mentioned this depends on your business, you maybe a photographer or digital artist that stored all your images for your clients online and if you lost that you would be in big trouble.
Identifying what is critical can allow you to put better measures in place, for instance if you use WordPress for your website, you can use a range of available plugins to backup your database with all your posts, and even your wp-content folder with all your assets for easy restoring if the worse happens.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, you are responsible for your data, if it is critical and important to you or your business, back it up, store it in a secure place such as DropBox, Google Cloud, etc – you may not think you will need it, but just like insurance on your car, it is there to cover you when you do need it.